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Destiny More at IMDbPro »Der müde Tod (original title)

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27 reviews in total

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20 out of 21 people found the following review useful:
Fritz Lang's First Great Film, 2 November 2001
Author: marquis de cinema from Boston, MA

Der Mude Tod/Destiny(1921) was the film where Fritz Lang began sharpening his trademarks of emotional and visual motifs. Focuses on themes Fritz Lang obsessed over in film and life. For instance, the conflict between love and death is faced by many protagonists(male or female) in numerous Fritz Lang pics. From Destiny(1921) to the director's final film, 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse(1960), Fritz Lang was occupied in his work by philosophies on death, life, love, notion of the after life, and redemption. The visual brilliance of Lang's later Silent films can be traced to this feature.

Figure of death is a compelling and sympathetic Lang character whose task is not an easy one. The character of death in Destiny(1921) does what is required of him without any subjective bias on the people he has to collect. Bernhard Goetzke puts on screen with his performance the most fascinating portrayal of death in a motion picture. The figure of death in Destiny(1921) is a lonely and sad figure whose wish is to do something else. The title of the film refers to death's inability to move outside of his destiny.

Der Mude Tod/Destiny(1921) was influential to directors of the silent and sound eras. Luis Bunuel was impressed by its amazing visual and sad qualities(thus the film became an influential force in most of Bunuel's work). It wouldn't be surprising that Destiny(1921) also influenced Ingmar Bergman especially with The Seventh Seal(1957). Other filmmakers influenced includes Enzo G.Castellari, Mario Bava, Roger Corman, and Terry Gilliam. The film's influences can be looked at in films as Lisa and the Devil(1972), Masque of the Red Death(1964), Keoma(1976), and Brazil(1985).

Candleroom sequence is a moment of floating beauty and surreal grace. The candleroom is an extraordinary visual set with a great deal of imagination put into it. The Candleroom is symbolic of the place where the Grim reaper watches over to see whose candle(life) will be put out. An excellent effect involves a candle glow dissolving into a baby. The Candleroom sequence has some terrific visual effects that blow away the CGI of today's motion pictures.

Contains a slateful of extraordinary visuals typical of a German Expressionistic film of that time. In films such as Destiny(1921), Fritz Lang used an aura of expressionistic imagery to display different emotions from his main characters. Visual use of the camera reaches its climatic level during the three tales. An example of why silent films where for the most part a great visual experience compared to many sound pictures. Destiny(1921) matches the astonishing imagery of Die Nibelungen(1924), Metropolis(1927), and Dr. Mabuse Der Spieler(1922) with excellent visuals of its own.

Out of Sympathy for a woman whose beloved died, the grim reaper gives her a chance to save one of three lives as exchange of return of beloved. Tale one takes place in Persia with forbidden love affair between Arab woman and Western adventurer. Tragic tale that benefits from director's imaginary use of Persian locations. The female protagonist attempts to save the adventurer to no avail. Least interesting of the three tales and most slow moving.

Second tale involves a love triangle with the city of Venice as the story's backdrop. The woman of this tale is promised to a man of well known prestige who she doesn't love. Her love is to someone who is not popular and the opposite of her finace. Includes an ingenious death plot that is similar to a situation in Marquis De Sade story, ERNESTINE:A SWEDISH TALE. Her plans ends up in a manner that the woman least hoped for.

The Imperial China tale is the third and best of the three tales. Magnificent camera effects gives it a mythical quality that creates a feel for the spectacle. An astonishing effect and maybe the director's most amazing effect in his silent films involves the creation by a magician of an army of toy sized soldiers. Deals with the Emperor of China who wants the magician's female assistent who is loved by the male assistent. Magical feeling of the amazing and bizarre is what makes the third tale something fantastic.

"Love is Stronger than death" is a good title for a potential documentary of the life and film works of Fritz Lang. More than any other line in a Fritz Lang film, "Love is Stronger than death" represents a summary of Fritz Lang's filmography. "Love is Stronger than death" deals with Fritz Lang's ideals about metaphysical love that goes beyond the confines of the mortal world. Destiny(1921) deals with this notion with use of abstract and metaphysical imagery. "Love is Stronger than death" can also be applied to the films of Mario Bava because of his similar fatalistic take on the topic of love.

After watching it for the first time, I consider Destiny(1921) among the director's finest silent films. An act of courage is performed by the heroine thus making her a tragic figure. Acting from the cast shines with moments of expressionistic beauty. Magificently envisioned by a master of expressionistic filmmaking. Destiny(1921) shows Fritz Lang's growth as an artist and his capabilites to become a legendary film director.

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16 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
Lang Shows the Way, 12 March 2002

Author: gbheron from Washington, DC

I don't know why, but one of my favorite film genres is German Expressionism. Like American film noir, it creates a dark vision of human existence from which a flowering of truth unfolds. And this truth is not what the protagonist wants to hear and comes at a great price. I love this stuff.

I recently had the opportunity to view "Der Müde Tod" theatrically, and it was pure heaven. Billed as Fritz Lang's first big hit, it's easy to see why. Filled with lavish spectacle and special effects, the film still maintains it's human level. And such a story: a young newlywed husband is taken by Death on his honeymoon. As in a fairytale, the bride is able to confront Death and beg for you her husbands return. Death will grant her this if she can once cheat him of one who is about to die. She is given three chances to pull off this trick, which transport her to Persia, Venice and China. Death, her husband and herself are characters in each of these fanciful locales. All this leads back to a gripping finale in Germany where it all began.

As far as silent movies go, this is one of the best.

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16 out of 18 people found the following review useful:
Excellent Atmosphere, & An Absorbing Story, 3 February 2005
Author: Snow Leopard from Ohio

The excellent atmosphere and absorbing story make Fritz Lang's "Der Müde Tod" (or "Destiny") one of the little-known gems of the early 1920s. In most other movies, the top-quality special visual effects would be the strongest part of the film, but here they are really just a valuable addition to a story that already had a lot to offer.

The atmosphere and the story also fit together very well, with the foreboding, Gothic tone and the expressionistic settings complementing an involved story of life, death, fear, and love. The plot is creative and quite interesting in itself, and it also suggests some important themes in the decisions that the characters face.

Lil Dagover gets what might be her best role, as she gets the opportunity to do quite a few different things with her character. Bernhard Goetzke excels in his forbidding role. Between the two of them, they get most of the best moments, with Lang's wonderfully conceived settings and camera tricks giving them plenty to work with.

Because it has so much going for it, this is a movie that works well both as entertainment and as a statement about humanity.

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11 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
A masterpiece of silent cinema, 24 April 2003

Author: Ilya Mauter

Directed by Fritz Lang, best known for his masterpiece "M", "Der Mude Tod" stands as probably his best early work. A silent classic, it tells the story of a young couple in a small German village and their encounter with the personification of death in a form of mysterious stranger that appears in a tavern and sits to their table indicating that the time is up for the young husband. After the death of her beloved the young woman is so desperate that she finally manages to enter the kingdom of dead and stand face to face with personification of Death himself (a major influence on Ingmar Bergman's Death figure in the Seventh Seal later) and ask him to give her beloved back to her. The Death finally yields to her persistence and agrees to deliver back the life of her husband, but only if she manages to find any person that would give up his life in exchange. She desperatly tries to convince various people to give up, beginning from a very old man and coming as far as Asylum for mentally ill but all in vain, for how bad the life of poor guys is, they are still very much reluctant to give it up, but it's only the beginning, the center of the film being three different stories of lost love, told by Death to the young woman, similar to her own, but set in three different exotic locations such as: China, Venice and Turkey.

A really amazing silent film, very romantic story but at the same time a moral tale with philosophical message in it. A must see. 10/10

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9 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Fables told in shadows, 21 February 2001

Author: austex23 from Austin, Texas

Wonderfully haunting in its images, this early Lang film has recently been reissued on DVD under the title Destiny. A title I have heard about for years, it is a pleasure to see it in a finely restored format that does justice to its beauty. The film is made up of four stories, a framing sequence and three historical vignettes, related by the central theme of a woman trying to defy Death to save her lover. While the plots are simple, the telling is astonishing in vision and execution and each of the four stories has a distinctive, entertaining tone -- the brooding expressionistic framing piece, a tale of Arabian adventure, a Renaissance romance, and a comic Chinese fantasy. I found the Chinese segment especially entertaining and some of the images -- such as the old magician transformed into a cactus -- are incredibly surreal and surprising 80 years after they were filmed. Interesting as the film that made Lang famous and very entertaining in its own right, I would recommend this film to anyone who likes cinema of the imagination.

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9 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Hauntingly Beautiful, 15 September 1999

Author: Darren O'Shaughnessy (darren shan) from Limerick, Ireland

One of Fritz Lang's lesser known - and, sadly, lesser shown - films is DESTINY, a haunting and beautiful film about a woman who wishes to rescue her lover from the clutches of Death, and travels to the past to do so. Filled with incredible images, this is both a visual treat - as you would expect from Lang - and also a bittersweet love story. An obvious influence on Ingmar Bergman's THE SEVENTH SEAL, this was also the film which made Luis Bunuel want to become a director. If you ever get the chance to see this, grab it. As important and impressive a silent film as SUNRISE or GREED.

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10 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
if only movies today used their sfx so well, 3 January 2003

Author: mmmuconn from movie heaven

Contemporary audiences must have been awed by the spectacle of the three exotic adventure episodes within `Der Mude Tod', but the imagery Fritz Lang employs in the bookends is the most fascinating aspect of the film today. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton had already occasionally used clever camera tricks, but Fritz Lang's film revels in special effects. Through editing and double exposure, he makes it look even now as though ghosts are disappearing through a garden wall, or that two lovers' souls are exiting their bodies. The most exciting thing about Lang's magic, of course, is that his images act as a foundation for beautiful, poetic ideas. His unusually sympathetic portrayal of Death is just one example of why the outer story resonates so much more than the obvious melodrama in its middle. Lang seems to argue that, while love cannot overcome death, it retains a power which even death would respect and envy.

Rating: 8

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8 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
"Love is Stronger Than Death", 26 February 2007

Author: wmorrow59 from Westchester County, NY

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The biographical entry for Fritz Lang in the invaluable World Film Directors reference book offers a revealing quote. It seems that when he was a teenager he became gravely ill, and at the peak of his delirium experienced a vivid hallucination. As Lang later described it, "I saw myself face to face, not terrifying, but unmistakable, with Death . . . I don't know whether I should call the feeling I experienced at that moment one of fear. It was horror, but not panic. I recovered quickly, but the love of death, compounded of horror and affection . . . stayed with me and became a part of my films." Lang, who was Austrian, served in the Army during the First World War where he saw considerable combat and, of course, encountered death on a horrific scale. (He also lost the use of his right eye.) While still in the service he launched his career in the movies by submitting screenplays to producer Joe May, and soon afterward acted in two of May's films, playing the Angel of Death in "Hilde Warren und der Tod." Lang began directing in 1919 and was successful almost immediately but remained largely unknown outside Germany until his first genuinely personal project, "Der Müde Tod," burst upon the scene in 1921 and became an international sensation. Lang's timing was perfect, for in the troubled period following the war interest in spiritualism and the afterlife was intense. This film represented the director's most thorough exploration of the fever dream of his adolescence, for here Lang utilized elements gathered from the myth and folkloric traditions of various cultures to explore a question posed by the leading lady to the Grim Reaper himself: Is Love stronger than Death?

In the opening scenes we're introduced to a happy young couple who intend to marry. On their travels they encounter a stranger, a gaunt and unsmiling figure in a black cloak who is heading for the same village that is their destination; the very sight of him darkens the atmosphere and kills their joyous mood. The stranger is Death himself, who seeks to purchase land owned by the village elders. The stranger informs the elders that he is weary-- from his exertions during the Great War? --and wishes to settle down. Once he buys land the stranger erects an estate surrounded by an impossibly high wall, a wall with no apparent door or entryway, and his next act is to claim the soul of the Young Man. The Young Woman searches the village and fails to find her fiancé, but when she takes poison she is able to pass through the wall and confront Death. He takes her to a room filled with candles representing the souls of humanity. When the Young Woman demands that Death restore her fiancé to life he agrees to do so only if she can defeat him, and he gives her three opportunities.

The Young Woman's three chances to defeat Death unfold in the form of three tales set in disparate parts of the world in three different historical periods: Persia in the days of the Caliphate, Renaissance Venice, and Imperial China. Three incarnations of her Young Man are threatened with extinction, and three incarnations of the Young Woman have a chance to rescue him. These stories make up the bulk of the movie and each is longer and more elaborate than the one preceding. Eventually, when the Young Woman proves unable to beat Death she is given one final chance to win back her fiancé, but when she finds the price demanded of her too high to pay, the lovers are nonetheless reunited in the afterlife in a strangely gratifying finale.

The historical adventures take place in highly stylized worlds, especially the Chinese segment, but even the film's Middle-European framing story features expressionistic structures that resemble stage sets, just as the (unnamed) young man and woman at the center of these events are meant to embody folkloric archetypes rather than dimensional characters. Lang's Persia, Venice and China suggest a child's notion of what these places might be like; the palaces have the look of enormous doll-houses. And of course the magical element is derived from fairy tales: the Chinese magician summons a miniature army of soldiers to amuse the Emperor, and is himself later turned into a cactus (one of the film's most memorable and disturbing images), while the Emperor is a fairy tale villain with grotesquely long claw-like fingernails. "Der Müde Tod" is, with Maurice Tourneur's 1918 classic "The Blue Bird," one of the cinema's first great flights of fantasy, suffused with imaginative effects and whimsical touches but undergirded with a deep sense of sadness.

Like many silent films this one has been shown in a variety of editions over the years, but the restoration completed in 2000 that is now available on DVD from Image Entertainment appears to be the closest to Lang's original version. This edition recreates the color tints of 1921 and the type-faces of the original title cards, which attempted to capture the exotic calligraphic styles of the three foreign lands of the adventure stories. (My only criticism is that I found the "Persian" type rather difficult to read.) This disc also boasts a beautiful score by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, music that enhances the visuals without drawing undue attention to itself. For those who can't attend a public screening of this rarely shown gem the Image DVD is about as good as silent movies get on the home screen; and Fritz Lang's "Der Müde Tod" is one of the most fascinating silent movies.

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7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Special effects put to good use, 26 September 2007

Author: stalker vogler from Xanadu

This should be a lesson to the movie makers of today who have at their disposal a range of special effects other directors never had, but they use them for moronic ideas. Der Mude Tod is amazing not for its camera tricks (such as double exposure) or for their filters that give the image a certain tint to make it more revealing, but for the brilliant use of these techniques in order to achieve an aesthetic ideal. German expressionism started to fascinate me after seeing The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, and then I went on to see some other movies that are loosely gathered under this label. Der mude Tod may not be as spectacular as Metrtopolis but it has the power to work on many levels as well. It's hard to place this in a genre, the IMDb thought it a fantasy but it is clearly more, it's romance, drama, and even a thriller in some moments. The story is a perfect example of the expressive possibilities of cinema, as the lead characters are used in three different stories connected in a larger fourth story. Just like Dr. Caligari there's more than meets the eye with the movie even if it does get a bit childish sometimes. Speaking of which, I think that the sets are constructed as if from the imagination of a child, they are definitely not "historically accurate". This goes to show you that producers today waste their money on accuracy leaving aside storytelling and good film making. And this is for the worst. And speaking of producers it is really a pity that when he came in America Lang made all those noirs and westerns. Some of them are good, because the direction is generally well done, but I think Lang could have used his talents on better scripts.

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7 out of 8 people found the following review useful:
Otherworldly, 11 October 2005

Author: Cineanalyst

The films of Weimer Germany are an interesting and exciting period to study. They share a rich cultural heritage, similar themes and revolutionary film styles and techniques. "Destiny" (Der Müde Tod) is the earliest mature work I've seen from Fritz Lang, one of the period's principal filmmakers--much better than the Spiders films. It's expressionistic, in the loose sense usually applied to these films, which is to say it's thematically dark and, occasionally, photographed and designed intentionally to affect mood and express emotions. An exceptional crew of cinematographers and art directors, as in many of the best films of the period, support the director.

Yet, I think the narrative has its faults; the frame narrative is great, but only the last of the three episodes within was entertaining--for its light and magical treatment. In the film, a girl's young lover dies, and Death offers her three tries to resurrect his life. The episodes are flimsy at times, but some impressive imagery and powerful performances by Lil Dagover and Bernhard Goetzke make up for much of that. Additionally, the exotic Arabian, historical Venetian and Chinese settings for the three inner episodes are well rendered, surely, but it's the haunting graveyard scenes and the meetings with Death, especially the room of candles scenes, that I'll remember. They're not merely exotic; they're otherworldly--the atmospheric, moving and imaginative places I want movies to take me.

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