DER MÜDE TOD
Love And Death
released OUT NOW! 1921 | PG | Blu-ray & dVd (dual format)
Director Fritz lang Cast Bernhard Goetzke, lil dagover, Walter Janssen, rudolf Klein-rogge
Pop culture has picked Metropolis as the movie to make Fritz Lang immortal but there was more to the master of Expressionism than Maria.
Der Müde Tod ended up falling through the cracks of cinema’s first century, for all that it impressed Hitchcock and inspired everyone from Luis Buñuel to Ingmar Bergman.
Impeccably restored for Blu-ray, Lang’s dreamy silent fable matches a pair of young lovers against Death in “a town lost to memory”. Bernhard Goetzke makes for a weary, sympathetic Reaper, his gaunt face halfPuritan, half-poet as he shares three tragic romantic vignettes that allow the movie to leap genres from Arabian swashbuckler to opulent Chinese fantasia.
It’s Lang’s imagery that endures: a landscape of melting candles, each representing the life of a man; the dead rising from their graves, early doubleexposure trickery conjuring their ectoplasmic advance; Goetzke’s ice-fire eyes meeting the camera and burning through the years. As the film ends a town cryer cautions, “Take care against ghosts and apparitions!” but sometimes nothing haunts us like the screen.
Extras Audio commentary by Tim Lucas, a new video essay by fellow critic David Cairns, and a 44-page booklet.
Douglas Fairbanks was so impressed he bought the rights to recreate the effects in 1924’s The Thief Of Baghdad.