DVD Review: The Beginnings of Fritz Lang from Kino Lorber

Dubbed the "Master of Darkness," Fritz Lang is counted among the most influential directors of all time, alongside the likes of Hitchcock, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Truffaut, and Orson Welles. His best known films include the futuristic Metropolis (1927), and the chilling M (1931), a film noir precursor made before he moved to the United States.

Lang is considered one of the great German directors – he is certainly the single greatest German director between the two World Wars, a period straddling the silent and sound eras. (His only rivals are, arguably, G.W. Pabst and F.W. Murnau.) Lang was also an accomplished Hollywood director – his American movies include Fury (1936), a classic, as well as a handful of notable dramas, Westerns, and thrillers including Ministry of Fear (1944). Today, Lang’s reputation rests largely on the dozen or so film noirs he made in Hollywood, stylish, brooding, gritty films like Scarlet Street (1945), The Big Heat (1953), and While the City Sleeps (1956).

Kino Lorber, a label best known for their reissues of cinema classic, has just released Fritz Lang: The Silent Films, an impressive twelve-disc, Blu-ray only collection gathering the complete surviving silent films of the cinema's supreme early stylist. Along with a 32-page booklet and a generous helping of special features and bonus material, the boxed set includes The Spiders (1919), Harakiri (1919), The Wandering Shadow (1920), Four Around the Woman (1921), Destiny (1921), Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927), Spies (1928), Woman in the Moon (1929), and The Plague of Florence (1919). The latter, based on Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” was directed by Otto Rippert from a screenplay by Lang. All of the other films were directed by Lang, with a few having also been written or produced by the director.

Lang enthusiasts or silent film buffs who purchased earlier video tapes or DVDs or even boxed sets of the director’s early work will find each of their treasures represented here in best available or restored versions (including original tints). Metropolis, for example, is the newsworthy 2010 restoration which incorporates 25 minutes of missing footage found in Argentina. (That missing footage include the material featuring Diary of a Lost Girl star Fritz Rasp.) There is also a 50 minute documentary on the making and restoration of the dystopian classic about a worker’s revolt.

The pleasure of a collection like Fritz Lang: The Silent Films is the chance to see the director’s lesser known and sometimes hard-to-find work. Two years after revolutionizing the science fiction film with his epic Metropolis, Lang revisited the genre with Woman in the Moon (1929), an ambitious spectacle that dramatizes the first lunar expedition. There’s also the strange and haunting film, Destiny. Inspired by a childhood dream, this is the work that first brought Lang widespread recognition. It is the story of a young man, taken by Death as he about to be married, whose fiancé makes a deal with Death to save him. Director Luis Bunuel wrote that Destiny “opened my eyes to the poetic expressiveness of the cinema … I suddenly knew that I wanted to make movies.”

Lang's monumental Die Nibelungen is well known in film history, but how many have seen it? This beautifully remastered edition of the more than four hour retelling of a Nordic legend boasts a high definition transfer that sweeps you into its mythic past.

The Spiders is an adventure film, and The Wandering Shadow is a thriller. Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (along with the later, sound-era Mabuse films) had an impact on the development of the crime film, as did Spies on the espionage genre. In some way, each anticipates the visual and metaphorical darkness of Lang’s later film noir efforts.

The Austrian-born Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang (1890 – 1976) had a five-decade long career as a filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional producer and actor in the two of greatest centers of film making in the 20th century, Weimar Germany and Hollywood. He worked in different genres and styles, successfully transitioning from silent to sound film and producing masterpieces in both forms. As noted film scholar Tom Gunning states in his booklet essay, “No other filmmaker had a career like Fritz Lang…. his silent films forged his unique vision. This box set brings together all of Lang’s existing silent films in restored versions (including original tints), offering a chance to experience the unity of his work as never before possible.”

I agree. Whether of not you own one or two or three of these films already, this affordably-priced box set is one every silent film enthusiast will want to own.

Lang’s films are at the heart of another recent release from Kino Lorber, From Caligari to Hitler,  a 2014 documentary by Rüdiger Suchsland. Anyone interested in exploring the cinema of Weimar Germany should check out this compelling study, which explores the many connections between the expressionist cinema of Germany and the subsequent rise of Nazism. Looking at landmark films like Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, Metropolis, The Golem, and others, Suchsland tracks the timely concept of the charismatic villain who bewitches the people. Sound familiar?