After a slight delay, our copy of THE INDIAN TOMB finally arrived from Masters of Cinema. The Watson-Cairns video essay on this one expanded to a whopping 45 mins, as our mission, which initially seemed not too exciting, became more and more fascinating and emotional the more we learned about director Joe May in our research, and the more interested we got in weaving his history together with those of collaborators Fritz Lang, Thea Von Harbou and Conrad Veidt.
One interesting discovery was the “Stuart Webbs” series of detective dramas which helped establish May (and Lang). We were unable to see even a single partial example of this series, but the posters are sure pretty.
Our essay is also available on the US release of the TOMB from Kino.
Since we’re making a video essay about Joe May’s THE INDIAN TOMB (1921), we’re naturally also digging into Fritz Lang again, since he co-wrote it with Thea Von Harbou. Lang is more distinguished than May, a genius rather than a sometimes-astute craftsman and businessman with moments of wizardry. Also, there is far more Lang available to see than there is of May’s long oeuvre.
Some of this research was already done — you can buy my video essays accompanying CLOAK AND DAGGER, WOMAN IN THE WINDOW, DER MUDE TOD and SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR.
So, we rewatched SPIONE and THE TESTAMENT OF DR, MABUSE and THE 1,000 EYES of same, and Lang’s own remake of the TOMB, which he liked to trash-talk later as “Indienschnulze” (India-tearjerker) and as DER TIGER VON DEXTROPUR (The Corn-sugar Tiger) and DAS KINDISCHE GRABMAL (the Childish Tomb). Thanks to Ulrich Ruedel for the nicknames and translations.
TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE stands out among the films we watched — I had always sort of doubted Lang’s word when he said he’d put Nazi slogans in the mouths of criminals, but it depends how good the translations are. On the Masters of Cinema Blu-ray you can hear Professor Baum (L. Frank?) speak of a thousand-year empire of crime. If you assume that Lang, in some way, saw the writing on the wall with his one good eye, or with some other, better eye, then the film’s ending is really remarkable:
Baum is reduced to gibbering insanity, as Mabuse had been, when his empire crumbles. The asylum attendant closes the door to lock him into the padded cell. And he closes it on us, too. Everything goes black and we hear the lock click with finality over a massive ENDE.
Assume it’s not modern mankind Lang intended to incarcerate in the loony bin (but it could be). Assume he senses on some unconscious level that he’ll soon be leaving the country. Assume it’s Germany that’s being shut up with the raving maniac, left behind.
Lang thrillers sometimes sag a bit in the middle — I think SPIONE does — but they kick in and become frenzied at the end. SPIONE has an equally great, abrupt ending, one which seems like a good Hitlerian prophecy (suicide by pistol, before a theatre audience, yet).
The brutal abruption of these endings is made possible partly because of the lack of end credits. What I’d somehow not noticed before is that Lang doesn’t have any opening credits either: just the production company (unavoidable), EIN FRITZ LANG FILM (with the F and I of FRITZ, the L of LANG and the M of FILM shaded to make a second FILM of shadow) and the title. Even Thea doesn’t get her name up there.
Other random thoughts —
There’s a Fritz Lang cinematic universe: Inspector Lohman from M comes back in TESTAMENT, tying the one-shot in with the series. And I’d like to think that Professor Baum’s collection of African masks (which mark him as a Lang stand-in, looking at Fritz’s own decor) made their way across the Atlantic to decorate Mark Lamphere’s home in SECRET BEYOND THE DOOR. Lanphere, a neurotic quasi-wife-murdering architect obsessed with predestination, is CERTAINLY a Fritz surrogate.
In SPIONE, a bad guy crashes his speeding jalopy into the revolving doors of the Atlantic Hotel — coincidentally or otherwise the name of the hotel in Murnau & Mayer’s THE LAST LAUGH, which has, memorably, the same doors. Possibly some acerbic commentary at work there. Murnau was transatlantic by that time.
The POV crashes, of car and train, are pretty incredible. Lang also blows up a factory, for real — I guess he was in competition with Harry Piel, the king of demolition and an ardent Nazi (most of his negatives were bombed out of existence, which is a shame for film history but seems somewhat fair).
The greatest intertitle in German cinema
Haghi, the Klein-Rogge mastercriminal here, is pretty close to being Mabuse under another name: he’s a master of disguise in charge of a criminal empire with an impressive desk. But the great thing about Mabuse is his dispersion through society. In the first double-film, DER SPIELER, he operates through disguises and proxies, but is still a corporeal spider at the centre of his criminous web. By the time TESTAMENT, he’s lost his mind, but is still scribbling crazy plans, which have seized the mind of his asylum superintendent, Baum. When Mabuse dies, his spirit appears by double-exposure and possesses Baum. Lang later felt this was an artistic mistake, for some reason — usually a good sign that he’s on to something. Lang’s inspirations are sublime, his afterthoughts often erratic.
In THOUSAND EYES, Mabuse is merely an idea. Anybody can become a Mabuse, simply by thinking about it too much. The fake Mabuse, appropriately enough, is a medium. Having dispensed with flesh and blood, the good doctor is unkillable. We’re stuck with him.
So, the reason Joe May’s been turning up so much here is that we’re at work on a video essay for Masters of Cinema’s forthcoming THE INDIAN TOMB Blu-ray, and it’s a job that benefits from a little research. Perversely, it turns out to be a project with an immense appetite, the more we dig up the more interesting it gets. Trying to stop it from running away and becoming gigantic, like the film itself.
We watched HOUSE OF FEAR — not the Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes adventure, but the earlier remake of Paul Leni’s THE LAST WARNING. Though May filmed on the same main set as his former production designer (who had in turn recycled the Paris Opera stage from the Chaney PHANTOM OF THE OPERA), he did not deign to produce a shot-for-shot remake, which is a pity. I expect budgetary limitations prevented that, so the movie is much flatter and more ordinary to look at — but it does feature a nice APPARITION…
Sadly, the play this is based on isn’t terribly interesting, except for a bravura climax that must have worked really well on the stage. Carl Laemmle (Junior, I think), the Universal studio boss who produced the original, reviewed the remake for Variety and gave it a pan. An act that highlighted how far both Laemmle and May had fallen.
I do give the movie points for attempting to electrocute El Brendel (top), but deduct those points since it failed to finish him off. He seems to be in this purely because he was in an earlier backstage thriller, THE SPIDER, which someone must have remembered, God knows why. Nobody’s bothered to write any Swedish meatball malapropisms for him, so he has no reason to be here, but then he never did in my view.
William Gargan “stars” and there’s a typically fun performance from Robert Coote, anticipating his swan song in THEATRE OF BLOOD.
shadowplay 