Die Spinnen
September 2nd, 2006
I won’t lie. Fritz Lang’s two-parter Die Spinnen is only recommended if you’ve seen most of his other movies already and can’t wait to see one of his earliest, from 1919/20. The image quality is as lousy as you’d expect–the picture is flickering with scratches–and the score is organ-only. Still, the pulpy adventure yarn is pretty watchable. It concerns Kay Hoog, a proto-Indiana Jones (Carl de Vogt), who travels to a lost Inca city and is persued by a shadowy crime organization known as the Spiders. Lil Dagover plays a Sun Priestress. Lang had projected two more sequels (the first adventure franchise?) but after he hooked up with Thea von Harbou, he went on to Destiny.
September 3rd, 2006 at 11:10 am
Have you ever seen “The Big Heat?”
September 5th, 2006 at 12:15 am
I have not. I’m DVR’ing everything directed by Lang but so far only his Westerns have cropped up. I’ve got “The Return of Frank James” recorded three times. Ugh.
September 10th, 2006 at 9:13 pm
[…] In 1921, hot off Die Spinnen, Fritz Lang was set to direct an adaptation of Thea von Harbou’s novel The Indian Tomb. But producer Joe May was convinced the two-part melodrama would be huge, so he decided to direct it himself. Almost forty years later, when he had a hard time finding work in Hollywood, Lang returned to Germany to direct a new version of the Indian epic. Both films–Der Tiger von Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb–are brightly colored and utterly risible. There’s an awful lot of brown makeup. YouTube happens to have the scene from the Lang’s ‘59 Tiger in which Seetha (Debra Paget), the dancer who has fallen in love with the European engineer, must prove her loyalty to the Maharaja by dancing with a deadly snake. It’s the best scene in the entire 3+ hours epic. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAXZR2CmpaM […]