DESTINY (1921)

Two young lovers (Lil Dagover and Walter Janssen) are riding in a carriage on their way to a small German village where they plan to get married. Along the road, a tall man in black materializes and the carriage stops to give him a ride. When the village dignitaries gather at the Golden Unicorn Inn for their evening nightcap, they are abuzz with talk of the mysterious stranger (Bernhard Goetzke, at right) who wants to buy up a large plot of land adjacent to the cemetery. After the purchase, the stranger surrounds it with a huge wall with no door or gate. One night at the inn, Janssen and the stranger go missing, and when Dagover goes to the stranger's wall, she sees a parade of transparent ghostly figures walking through the wall, and one of them is Janssen. Realizing that the dark stranger is Death, she approaches him insisting that love is stronger than death and begs him to release Janssen to the land of the living. Death makes her an offer: she will enter the lives of three people destined to die, and if she can keep one of them alive, he will bring Janssen back. What follows are three vignettes in which Dagover, Janssen, and Goetzke become the three main characters. The first, set in Baghdad at Ramadan, involves a princess in love with an infidel who is marked for death by her brother, the caliph. In the second story, set during Carnival in Venice, a noblewoman, set to marry a nobleman, is in love with a commoner, and plots to kill her fiancé before he can kill her lover. Lastly, the Emperor of China demands not only that the magician A Hi perform for him on his birthday, but also wants to take his female assistant Tiao Tsien as a gift. Her lover Liang is captured and she uses the magician's magic wand to set things right, with mixed results. As you might guess, Dagover is unable to save any of the three destined victims. Will Death comply with one last wish of hers?

The German title of this Fritz Lang film, Der mude Tod (Weary Death), refers to the weariness that the Death figure feels; he explains to Dagover that he is simply doing God's will, just another worker at a job that doesn't make him happy. The German subtitle is A German Folk Song in Six Verses, and though this is a silent film with no songs, the whole thing feels like something that a troubadour might have sung about. As in a song or folktale, we have to take the lovers' feelings for granted since we get no real background or development of character. Lang's visuals are striking. Among the more memorable images: the gargantuan wall, the flying carpet in the Chinese story, a large dark room filled with flickering candles, each representing one life, each being snuffed out when each life comes to an end; the eerie figure of Death himself. The stories all bog down a bit because the frame story is the most compelling; as for the actors, Goetzke stands out just because of his look and demeanor. The saddest and most resonant moments in the film are in the last section. Dagover has been sent through the village to find a person, already close to death, who will give up their life to save Janssen, but each person, despite being old or sickly, says no, replying that they will give up "not a single hour, not a single day, not a single breath." A dark and moody film which has a satisfying if ultimately sad ending. [Blu-ray]