The structure of the film includes the main story involving a young couple and Death in historical Germany, plus three other sections: Arabic, Italian and Chinese. A young couple stops their travels in a small hamlet. There they encounter Death, who takes the young fiance one evening. Death has built a huge walled-in area in the town and the fiancée witnesses the entry of ghost souls, including her fiance, into Death’s wall. She drinks poison to follow her beloved into the wall. But Death is not villainous. Death gives the young fiancée three opportunities — three lives represented by three candles — to save to spare her lover’s life.

The first story takes place in a Moslem country. A caucasian unbeliever enters a mosque during Ramadan looking for his secret love, the caliph. He escapes. The caliph demands the infidel’s blood. She arranges to bring him into the Palace to safeguard him. The second story is Italian, with well-known character actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge. A woman is betrothed to a man she despises. Her lover is targeted for death. A messenger is assassinated with her entreaty to him to flee. Meanwhile, she hatches a plot to murder her tormentor. The third story is Chinese. The emperor demands a magician for his birthday celebration. The magician has two assistants who secretly smooch. The emperor takes a fancy to the girl, and refuses to accept otherwise. The couple try to flee. He is to be beheaded. She manages to use the magician’s magic wand. They flee together. The story returns to the Germanic era. Has she saved her beloved?

The flying carpet effect in the Chinese story was among the reasons Douglas Fairbanks bought the US rights to this film to suppress its distribution until he could study and incorporate its special effects into The Thief of Bagdad (1924).

The film is stylishly designed and directed. We love Death’s large mysterious wall and the set design of the Arabic and Chinese stories. Lil Dagover, herself, is lovely. And Bernhard Goetzke makes a stern and brooding Death. — Carl Bennett

Windowboxed transfer! Hooray! We have long been proponents of windowbox tranfers of silent era films. Many silent films have survived in duped 35mm prints or in 16mm reduction prints that were made at a time when the goal to capture as much picture image as possible was not a concern. All television monitors do their own image cropping, leaving out a portion of the image all the way around a picture screen intentionally. The outside area cropped from a television picture is known as overscan. When silent films are transferred to full-frame television it is possible that the edges of intertitles and the tops of heads can be lost to overscan cropping. Windowbox transfers slightly shrink the whole image to fit within an area easily within the overscan cropping area of all televisions allowing the viewing of the complete surviving image.

The video transfer has been made from a 35mm French reissue print. Some framing shows the upper and lower right corners of the camera’s original aperture but not on the left, possibly indicating some image loss to an old optical soundtrack in a reissue print manufactured from a silent negative with processing equipment set-up for sound films with optical soundtracks. The minor loss of image is only apparent in off-center iris shots and slit shots like Death’s escorting the young woman up his long staircase beginning at 25:03.

Typefaces designed to resemble Gothic, Arabic and Asian typefaces have been used for intertitles to emulate the original fonts used in the German release prints. While we can appreciate the attempt to capture the feel of the original intertitles, and while the font may have looked good in the producer’s video editing suite, the intertitles are a little hard to read at their screen sizes in the lower resolution of NTSC, even on a big screen.

The surviving 35mm print itself is a bit contrasty. Some highlights are blasted to white and some shadows are pinched off to black. To compensate for the contrasty print, we found that some small amount of detail can be held in the shadows of shots by turning down the contrast and slightly raising the brightness on our television monitor up from a balanced standard. The transfer has been color-toned in a restrained sepia and blue, with black and white sections. The contrasty duplicate print is in very good condition, with some slight exposure fluctuations, light scratches, speckling, scuffing, some vertical scratches, and other minor damage including occasional frame jumps. Some shots feature a well-balanced grayscale range. We do question, however, whether the editing of this reissue print resembles Lang’s original edit as some sequences appear to be out of logical order.

In reevaluating the DVD on high-definition equipment with upscaling of the standard NTSC signal to 1080p, we regretfully have decided to lower our rating of the video quality of the disc. The tonal range of the surviving footage is too contrasty throughout to be offset by a number very-good looking shots. The overall visual quality is closer to commonly-viewed 16mm reduction prints.

The film presentation is enhanced by a small orchestra musicial accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. The music is comprised of adaptations of traditional German melodies and other authentically arranged scores to compile a very welcome and very pleasing film score. We have taken to playing the DVD while we work just to listen to the musical performance.

Overall, we believe the film has been more than adequately presented in home video by producer David Shepard, who has done the best possible work with a slightly compromised print coupled with an above-average musical accompaniment. We recommend this Fritz Lang addition to the silent era films available on DVD home video.

USA: Click the logomark at right to purchase a Region 1 NTSC DVD of this edition from Amazon.com.
Canada: Click the logomark at right to purchase a Region 1 NTSC DVD of this edition from Amazon.ca.
United Kingdom: Click the logomark at right to purchase a Region 1 NTSC DVD of this edition from Amazon.co.uk.

Other GERMAN silent era films available on home video.