Les Trois Lumières

In a small village somewhere in time, a stranger lease for ninety-nine years a field annex to the cemetery and surround it with a very high wall without gate. When a young couple of travelers stop in a local tavern for resting, the fiancé vanishes and her fiancée seeks him and meets his spirit entering through the wall. She finds an entrance and finds that the stranger is actually Death, who is tired of bringing suffering to the world. She begs for the life of her beloved fiancé, and Death proposes her to save one of three lives that are in the end. If she succeeds, Death will bring her lover back to live. The lady becomes a woman in Persia, in Venice and in China, and in all situations she fails to save her respective lover. Death gives her one last chance, if she manages to find within one hour a person in the village that could give up living. When the local hospital is burning in fire, the young woman realizes the only way to stay with her lover.

"Der Müde Tod" is another magnificent fantasy of the genius Fritz Lang. Ingmar Berman was certainly influenced and inspired by this stunning film with his masterpiece "Det Sjunde Inseglet" (a.k.a. "The Seventh Seal"). It is amazing how Fritz Lang was able to generate shadows and special effects with the primitive apparatuses in the incipient cinema. Further, the originality of his screenplays is absolutely impressive. "Der Müde Tod" shows wonderful fantasy about the duel between love and death, with a beautiful message in the end, proving that love is stronger than death. My admiration for this master increases after watching each of his movies. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil): "A Morte Cansada" ("The Tired Death")

Contemporary audiences must have been awed by the spectacle of the three exotic adventure episodes within `Der Mude Tod', but the imagery Fritz Lang employs in the bookends is the most fascinating aspect of the film today. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had already occasionally used clever camera tricks, but Fritz Lang's film revels in special effects. Through editing and double exposure, he makes it look even now as though ghosts are disappearing through a garden wall, or that two lovers' souls are exiting their bodies. The most exciting thing about Lang's magic, of course, is that his images act as a foundation for beautiful, poetic ideas. His unusually sympathetic portrayal of Death is just one example of why the outer story resonates so much more than the obvious melodrama in its middle. Lang seems to argue that, while love cannot overcome death, it retains a power which even death would respect and envy.

Rating: 8

Directed by Fritz Lang, best known for his masterpiece "M", "Der Mude Tod" stands as probably his best early work. A silent classic, it tells the story of a young couple in a small German village and their encounter with the personification of death in a form of mysterious stranger that appears in a tavern and sits to their table indicating that the time is up for the young husband. After the death of her beloved the young woman is so desperate that she finally manages to enter the kingdom of dead and stand face to face with personification of Death himself (a major influence on Ingmar Bergman's Death figure in the Seventh Seal later) and ask him to give her beloved back to her. The Death finally yields to her persistence and agrees to deliver back the life of her husband, but only if she manages to find any person that would give up his life in exchange. She desperatly tries to convince various people to give up, beginning from a very old man and coming as far as Asylum for mentally ill but all in vain, for how bad the life of poor guys is, they are still very much reluctant to give it up, but it's only the beginning, the center of the film being three different stories of lost love, told by Death to the young woman, similar to her own, but set in three different exotic locations such as: China, Venice and Turkey.

A really amazing silent film, very romantic story but at the same time a moral tale with philosophical message in it. A must see. 10/10

Wonderfully haunting in its images, this early Lang film has recently been reissued on DVD under the title Destiny. A title I have heard about for years, it is a pleasure to see it in a finely restored format that does justice to its beauty. The film is made up of four stories, a framing sequence and three historical vignettes, related by the central theme of a woman trying to defy Death to save her lover. While the plots are simple, the telling is astonishing in vision and execution and each of the four stories has a distinctive, entertaining tone -- the brooding expressionistic framing piece, a tale of Arabian adventure, a Renaissance romance, and a comic Chinese fantasy. I found the Chinese segment especially entertaining and some of the images -- such as the old magician transformed into a cactus -- are incredibly surreal and surprising 80 years after they were filmed. Interesting as the film that made Lang famous and very entertaining in its own right, I would recommend this film to anyone who likes cinema of the imagination.

The excellent atmosphere and absorbing story make Fritz Lang's "Der Müde Tod" (or "Destiny") one of the little-known gems of the early 1920s. In most other movies, the top-quality special visual effects would be the strongest part of the film, but here they are really just a valuable addition to a story that already had a lot to offer.

The atmosphere and the story also fit together very well, with the foreboding, Gothic tone and the expressionistic settings complementing an involved story of life, death, fear, and love. The plot is creative and quite interesting in itself, and it also suggests some important themes in the decisions that the characters face.

Lil Dagover gets what might be her best role, as she gets the opportunity to do quite a few different things with her character. Bernhard Goetzke excels in his forbidding role. Between the two of them, they get most of the best moments, with Lang's wonderfully conceived settings and camera tricks giving them plenty to work with.

Because it has so much going for it, this is a movie that works well both as entertainment and as a statement about humanity.