Le Tombeau hindou

The second part of "der Tiger von Eschnapur" begins with a de rigueur summary .Although it's the same movie divided into two for business concern,"das Indische Grabmal" surpasses its predecessor and makes it sometimes look like a trailer.

All promises are fulfilled ;Everything Lang threatened to achieve in "der Tiger " materializes here.Here the two worlds (the luminous world of the maharajah and the subterraneans where the darkest secrets are hidden ) play an equal part .How can't we think of "Metropolis" when the lepers come up the stairs and force their way in the light of day?The maharajah is much more than a comic strip character here.He appears as a tortured man -the actor who plays this monarch is actually a German one,the one who plays count Andrassy is the "Sissi" saga-.Little by little ,we discover that he's in fact the real hero of the story-Mercier is absent during an hour in this part-:his evolution is downright intriguing .At the end of the story he found peace of mind in a completely unexpected way.

Remarkable scenes :the spider that spins its web and thus protects the lovers;their enemies seen behind this providential shield.Paget's erotic dance in front of the snake (which echoes to the long scene in the first part when Mercier watches her dancing).And mainly, mainly,these labyrinthine subterraneans which may represent the dark side of the mind .The two worlds (he said that in "die Nibelungen" (1924),there were four worlds!) are a permanent feature in Lang's canon:of course "Metropolis " springs to mind.But think of the underworld of "M";the double life of Andrews in "beyond a reasonable doubt" ;the child's world and the adults' one in "Moonfleet";the "normal "side of life and the secret one beyond the door in the eponymous movie;real life and dream (but where is the frontier?) in "woman in the window" .

Fritz Lang's holiday homework is actually his testament.He would do one more movie ("die tausend Augen des Doctor Mabuse"),but it seemed that,like his hero,he had found peace of mind in this movie.You can forget,unless you're a highbrow,his part in Godard's notorious "le mépris".

Like John Huston or Joseph Mankiewicz ,Lang finished his career brilliantly.

Done with Hollywood by the mid 1950s, Fritz Lang returned to Germany and decided to remake THE INDIAN TOMB , a legendary German silent film from 1921 that he thought he was going to direct before producer Joe May (pronounced MY) decided to do it himself. Lang had co-written the script with future wife Thea von Harbou based on her novel. Just as in the case of the first film, the remake was epic in scope and was divided into two features THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR (TIGER OF BENGAL in 1921) and THE INDIAN TOMB. This time around the film was in color and definitely wasn't a silent. It runs 201 minutes only 10 minutes shorter than the original.

The movie was butchered for its American release (it was reduced to 90 minutes) and released here as JOURNEY TO THE LOST CITY. The film features a stalwart cast of German actors. The male lead, Paul Hubschmid, was in BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS and billed as Paul Christian. The one exception is American actress Debra Paget. She was criminally underused in American movies and here she gets a chance to shine in the pivotal role of Seetha the temple dancer around which the film revolves. Her dances and costumes (or lack of them) are remarkably exotic and are a main highlight of the film. Paget did study dance before she became an actress.

Much has been made in other reviews of THE INDIAN EPIC about how cheesy some of the effects are (the Fakir's decapitated head is especially bad). I thought the Cobra was deliberately meant to be unrealistic and it's quite clear that no live tigers were harmed in the making of the movie. Ultimately the less than stellar effects are unimportant. What is important are the overall look of the film (the Temple set is amazing) and the way the episodic narrative moves along. It manages to draw you in despite its shortcomings. It's also an opportunity to watch a great director at the end of his career receive a first class homecoming in this expensive German production.

This new Blu Ray edition from Film Movement looks great but is problematic. First up it's not in Lang's original aspect ratio which crops some of the picture. More importantly, unlike the earlier DVD packaging by Fantoma, there is no English language version which will put off many viewers. The Fantoma DVDs are absolutely top notch and is how it should be done. Not only is the print beautifully transferred but you get the English dubbed soundtrack for those who can't abide subtitles (I prefer the German soundtrack as being less artificial). If you have to have Blu-Ray then this is the one to get. BTW, even though it's over 100 years old, THE INDIAN TOMB is still the better film...For more reviews visit The Capsule Critic.

Seetha (Debra Paget) and Harold Berger (Paul Hubschmid) are rescued from the desert by a caravan and brought to a small village. However, the greedy owner of the house where they are lodged betrays the law of hospitality and reveals their location to Prince Ramigani (René Deltgen). The couple tries to escape but is hunted and captured by Ramigani and his men. Meanwhile Irene Rhode (Sabine Bethmann) and her husband Walter Rhode (Claus Holm) suspect that Maharaja Chandra (Walter Reyer) is not telling the truth about Harold's destiny. The conspirator Ramigani forces Seetha to accept to get married with Chandra to provoke the wrath of the priests and get the alliance of Prince Padhu (Jochen Brockmann) and his army. In the meantime, Harold succeeds in escaping from the dungeon and seeks out Seetha to save her.

"Das Indische Grabmal" is the delightful conclusion of a romantic adventure in the exotic India. This family movie seems to be a matinée with wonderful moments, like for example, the spider building its web and protecting the lovers after the offering of Seetha to her god Shiva; or the sexy dance of Seetha; or the maze in the underground of the palace; or the dead bodies without gore. The colors are splendidly restored in the DVD released in Brazil by Continental in the beautiful locations and sets, and it is possible to see the strings controlling the snake while Seetha is dancing. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "Sepulcro Indiano" ("Indian Tomb")

Please see also my review of The Tiger of Eschnapur.

The Indian Tomb was the second part of a pair of pictures directed by Fritz Lang, his first German productions since the 1930s, adapted from a screenplay he had himself worked on nearly thirty years earlier. The two of them should really be considered one whole work as much as were his two-part epics from the silent era, Dr Mabuse: Der Spieler (1922) and Die Nibelungen (1924). These earlier opuses were among the most prestigious works made, not only in Germany but anywhere in the world at the time. However this Indian diptych of the late-50s, a product of the drastically different post-war German film industry, looks like some cheap and cheerful Euro B-flick, at least at first glance.

The Indian Tomb and its forerunner The Tiger of Eschnapur certainly bear many hallmarks of a trashy proto-exploitation feature. The Indian characters are played rather unconvincingly by Europeans in "brownface", the special effects are often laughable (stuffed tigers in part one, which are outdone by plastic cobras in part two), a bit of partial female nudity, and a fast-paced plot of action and romance with more than of a few plot holes, imagination-stretchers, and complete suspensions of logic – the most stupendous of which has to be the unexplained concept that lepers are actually zombies. To make matters worse, the two pictures were cut down into one movie by American International Pictures, Roger Corman's distributor, and for years this was all English-speaking audiences could see of them. Today however we are lucky enough to have fully-restored versions of both parts available to us, including a subtitled German version, which is far preferable to the atrocious English dub, assuming you can get over the illogic of Indians speaking to each other in German. Now at last we are able to rediscover and re-evaluate Fritz Lang's final masterpiece.

On closer inspection, these two pictures are not quite so low in their values and appeal as one might think. For a start, the fact that Europeans play Indians is not really so different to westerners playing Arabs in Lawrence of Arabia. And there would be female nudity in Blow-up, and that is considered arty! The cast, while not exactly award-worthy, are uniformly decent, with the standout being Walter Reyer's eerily underplayed portrayal of the unbalanced Maharajah. There's a fabulous musical score by Gerhard Becker, and although admittedly the invented "Uncle Pat" song sounds more like a Gregorian chant than a Irish folk ballad, when Becker interpolates it into the main score on sweeping strings it makes a wonderful, aching love theme. The plot too is more than just your typical fight-a-minute no-brainer. While far from realistic its rip-roaring adventure has many strands to it, such as the political infighting of the fictional eastern province and the Maharajah's descent into jealousy-fuelled madness. It is of course aspects like this that would have been ripe for the chop when the pictures were re-edited in the US.

And now let us turn to the contribution of Herr Lang himself. Although he spent most of his twenty years in Hollywood making cheap and sometimes nasty B-flicks, he never lost the flair and professionalism of his early German career, at which time he was rightly regarded as one of the most important talents at UFA studios. He was always at his best presenting adventure stories tinged with a slightly dark, paranoid streak which, while unfortunately being the subject of auterist psychobabble, mainly serves to heighten the sense of danger and excitement. As in The Tiger of Eschnapur the vast, angular sets are given prominence, with shots composed so that the walls seem to press in on all sides. There's often a passage or open door at the back of the room, suggesting that the heroes could be crept up upon from behind at any moment. Early on there's a shot where Walter and Irene are in their quarters, and a net curtain covers one corner of the frame. By cinematic convention this looks like a point-of-view shot, which gives this unnerving feeling that the couple are being watched. The carefully orchestrated action finale, in which all the various elements – the rebellion, Harald's escape, the flooding of the catacombs – reach a crescendo is reminiscent of the climactic scenes of Metropolis and Die Nibelungen. It is really such a good thing that Lang, the man who brought our dreams and our nightmares to the screen with such vibrancy, did not end his career in lower-end Hollywood productions. His Indian epic is a glorious and worthy tribute to his silent-era heyday.

I was wary of purchasing Fantoma's 2-Disc Set of "Fritz Lang's Indian Epic" after being somewhat let down by the 1921 Silent original (co-scripted by Lang himself) and also its less-than-stellar reputation. For this reason, when the second part of the saga turned up on Italian TV a couple of years ago, I decided to check it out just the same so as to get an inkling of what to expect! I recall thinking it pretty kitschy and unworthy of Lang's enormous talent, but Fantoma's sale (through their website) of their entire DVD catalog a few months back made it an irresistible acquisition! Well, having now watched the entire saga (with dialogue and in color, as opposed to the rather static Silent version directed by Joe May - although hearing the Indian-garbed characters talking in German took some getting used to), I was pleasantly surprised by how genuinely engaging and sheerly enjoyable it all was! Though it was sold as an epic production (to the point of concluding ESCHNAPUR with the promise that Part II would feature greater thrills and even more spectacle) at a time when such films were all the rage, the saga was actually a pretty modest undertaking by eclectic (and prolific) German producer Artur Brauner. Despite the two films' exotic, handsome look (not least in the provocative dances of Debra Paget), the budgetary constraints were painfully obvious in the special effects department, especially the hilarious appearance of a 'ropey' cobra which is intended to 'test' (the scantily-clad) Miss Paget's faithfulness to the Maharajah!! All in all, even if these films hardly constitute Lang's greatest work (though he harbored an evident affection throughout his life for this particular tale, which was originally conceived by his former wife Thea von Harbou), they have great - and enduring - appeal for aficionados of old-fashioned, serial-like adventure stories tinged with romance and mysticism.

Even so, while I don't subscribe to that school of thought myself, there are some film critics (Tom Gunning, Jean Douchet and Pierre Rissient among them) who think very highly of Lang's Indian diptych - the first considering it one of Lang's towering achievements and the last two numbering it among the ten greatest films of all time!!