Silent movies - Destiny

It's high time for a Fritz Lang movie and no, it's not "Metropolis" which has patiently been waiting in my DVD collection for many years.
Instead I have "Der müde Tod" (literally "The Weary Death") from 1921 for you, in English called "Destiny".

Let's start with the plot (with spoilers) as usual.

A young couple is riding in a carriage whose driver also picks up a stranger.
Having arrived in a small town, that stranger buys a plot next to the cemetery and builds a huge wall without a visible door around it.
Later, the young couple meets him again at the tavern. While the woman goes to the kitchen, her lover and the stranger disappear and she goes searching for them. When she comes to the wall, a group of ghosts walks through her and the wall into the realm of Death, one of them her lover.
She confronts the stranger who is of course Death himself, begging him to give back her lover because love is stronger than death.
He tells her that he is weary of seeing the struggle and earning hate for obeyeing God's orders, so he would be glad for her to conquer him. He shows her three flickering candles and says that he will revive her lover if she can save one of these lives.

Each of the stories of the three lights are told with the young couple as the lovers in different roles.
The first one is about Zobeide, the Caliph's sister, who's in love with a Frank. He is caught by the guards and sentenced to death by the Caliph. Zobeide is not able to save him and Death claims his life.
The second one is about Monna Fiametta in Venice. She's engaged with one of the Council of Fourteen, Girolamo, but she hates him. Her lover is Gianfrancesco whom Girolamo wants to have executed. Monna's plan to invite and then kill Girolama goes awry when he sees through her ploy and Gianfrancesco dies instead. The second light burns out.
The third one tells the story of a magician's assistants, Tiao Tsien, who catches the Emperor's attention, and her lover Liang. They try to escape, but the Emperor's archer catches up with them and kills Liang.

Although she hasn't been able to save any of the three lives, Death has pity with the young woman and offers her the life of her lover if she manages to find a soul to replace his within the next hour.
Several of the old people in town refuse to give her their lives.

When a building catches fire, everyone can escape, but a small baby is still in the house. The young woman sees her chance and runs inside, but when Death comes to claim the baby's soul and she sees the desperate mother through the window, she can't give it to him. She lowers the baby out of the window and offers Death her own soul instead, happy to be reunited with her lover in death.

Let's get to the elephant in the room first (not the actual one in the movie) to have that out of the way.
As you can imagine for a movie of that time, the stories of the first and third light felt awkward, not for the plot, but the stereotypes of the cultures depicted, the third one more than the first one.

It's a pity because I really liked the movie itself.
It's said to have been inspired by the Indian tale of Savitri and Fritz Lang's experience when he was sick with a fever as a child, but I can easily see this in a fairy tale from another country as well.
Actually Lang called it "ein deutsches Volkslied in sechs Versen" (a German folk song in six verses).

If you know fairy tales, especially original versions instead of the cleaned up ones, the ending may not even be that surprising. I know I read more than one that didn't have a happy ending for everyone. That might be something very German, more so at the time if you keep in mind that World War I had not been over for that long and still influenced everyday life.
However, the movie wasn't well received by German critics at first for not being "German" enough because of all the foreign settings. In the USA where it was released three years later, the intertitles had been changed in a way that suggested the young woman was to blame for her lover's death in all verses which was not the intention of the creators, so it wasn't successful there as well. It was better received in France which then also brought it more acclaim in Germany.

To me, this expressionist movie had a great mood, but it wasn't dark throughout. There was the scene in the carriage or the depiction of the town's elders which definitely showed humor.
I was really impressed by Death, beautifully played by Bernhard Goetzke, a reaper who was not just grim, but also kind and weary of the heavy burden he had to carry eternally.
He was also the reason why I loved the main story itself more than those of the three lights.

A surprising turn for me was the young woman searching for a soul she could give to Death for that of her lover. To be honest, I had expected her to sacrifice herself earlier which is something you know from many other stories. She, however, rather boldly begs several old people in town to give up their lives, but they refuse "Not a single day, not a single hour, not a single breath".
She's tempted until the last second when she storms into the burning house and has almost handed the baby to Death already. Now that would have been very selfish.

There were some nice special effects too which worked well, for example the double exposures, the flying carpet or the dancing scroll.

Will this movie end up on my rewatch list? A clear yes from me.


Sources:

1. Daniel Lammin: Destiny (Fritz Lang, 1921). On: Senses of Cinema, June 2018
2. David Vining: Destiny. On: David Vining, Author. August 5, 2022
3. Jay Weissberg: Destiny. Essay. On: San Francisco Silent Film Festival 2016