The Wandering Image

This movie seems to be quite a rare one; I gather it was found in a private collection somewhere in Brazil. The version I saw has Portuguese titles, but English subtitles can also be found.

At first you will have a feeling that there is something missing, but more or less everything will become clear later. Not explaining everything at once, Lang succeeds in emphasizing the frenzy in which we find the heroine, running away from the mysterious man.

Perhaps the movie should have been made longer, especially in the flashback part, but I guess Lang wanted to make a thriller, not a drama. However, Wikipedia says that the movie is partially lost, so we will never know what it was like in the original version.

I guess that anyone who likes silent movies must like this one too. After all, Fritz Lang was probably the only director who managed to be great both in silent and talking movies.

If I had been a contemporary of Fritz Lang in his early career, this is about the point that I'd begin writing him off. There was some entertainment in the first of the Spiders episodes, but the only real positive attribute of the next two films was the production design. Here, in The Wandering Shadow, there's still a strong visual element that comes up from time to time, mostly when filming in the mountains, but the story is a complete jumble. Not helped by the fact that a good chunk of the film is lost, it's an overplotted, under-written slog.

Being incomplete isn't always a deal breaker. Thinking back to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Der var engang, another incomplete film that I actually kind of fell in love with despite the missing sections, explanatory text helps fill in the gaps and can even provide some level of emotional catharsis if the remaining elements support it. It can also end up like John Ford's Mother Machree where the final two reels were completely missing, and there was no way to tell where the story was even going to go. I don't think the missing parts of The Wandering Shadow are debilitating to understanding the film. They cause a certain confusion, especially early, but that's eventually overcome. The problem isn't that there are missing sections, but that the sections that are there are all situation and no character.

Irmgard (Mia May) is on a train into the mountains of Germany where, coincidentally, her deceased husband's cousin, Wil Brand (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), who is in pursuit of her in order to claim the inheritance he thinks is his, is also riding. When he sees her emotional state, he sends off a telegraph to his lawyer to stop all efforts at claiming the inheritance. I don't know what the point of all that was. Anyway, Irmgard is fleeing from her husband's twin brother John (Hans Marr) for unclear reasons that will get cleared up. All we need to know in the beginning is that she's fleeing him, so when he catches up, Wil helps Irmgard flee into the mountains where she goes up alone. John is in quick pursuit, though, and catches up with her just in time for a mysterious mountain man to save her from John. It turns out that this mountain man is, completely coincidentally, Georg (also Marr), her husband. Well, not really. We'll get to that.

It's in Georg's cabin that we finally get the reasons for the first half hour of the film in the form of two extended flashbacks, one from each character, that explains how they both got there. Georg was a noted philosopher who was a proponent of free love when he met Irmgard. They fell in love, but his affection for her was at odds with his beliefs. When she conspired with John to use his identical look to forge a wedding certificate at the local church that said that Irmgard and Georg were married, Georg (the real one) decides to fake his death and flee without telling anyone (again...that Irmgard ran into Georg in the middle of the mountains in the middle of a chase was a complete coincidence). John seemingly wants to maintain the fiction (or reality, I guess) that he is married to Irmgard so that he can inherit Georg's money. The way all of this information is divvied out is really dense without any real room for character.

Why does Irmgard love Georg? Because the plot demands it, essentially. Who is Wil? Doesn't matter. Why is John so desperate for the cash? Because he's bad, I guess. It's all super thin, and that undermines any sort of emotional catharsis that's supposed to happen when the two meet up and then spend the rest of the movie trying to figure out ways to get back together. She can't abandon their daughter (who should be 2 but looks at least 5), and he can't give up on a vow he made to a statue of the Virgin Mary carried the Christ child in the mountains that he wouldn't leave until it comes alive and walks away. The predictability of how this is going to manifest is pretty obvious once we see Irmgard taking care of a poor woman's child. It's also really weird that the final intertitle completely forgets their daughter, seemingly implying that they abandon her.

Really, the only thing going for the film is the location shooting. Filming in the German Alps, Lang uses the high mountains to create some very nice compositions, in particular around the vertical space with people looming over each other. Set work is much more mundane, though the destruction of Georg's shock in an avalanche, as seen from the inside, does show some very nice detail (though the set itself is understandably threadbare). In the end, though, it feels like Lang, and his screenwriter wife Thea van Harbou) were struggling to find stories to tell within the new medium that they were still learning. Perhaps it was increasing pressure from Joe May, his producer, to find a hit, working in melodrama that seems to have been much more popular in the past than now.

The incompleteness doesn't help the film, but I also don't think it really hurts it either. The film simply isn't that good.

Das wandernde Bild (1920)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

This 1920 German film is one of Fritz Lang's earliest and for decades it was considered lost before a print turned up in Brazil in 1986. As with FOUR AROUND A WOMAN, another Lang film, this one here is missing at least two or three reels. I've read four different reviews for this film and each one gave a different description of the plot. What is certain the film is about a woman (Mia May) who runs away from her abusive husband. She ends up in some mountain era where she hides out only to run into what appears to be her husband's twin brother. Soon the husband is back on her trail as she runs into a former boyfriend who had taken a vow of celibacy. There are other plot twists with more people coming and going but it's pretty hard to tell exactly what's going on for a couple reasons. Of course there's the fact that so much of the film is missing but another negative thing is that the film has Portuguese inter-titles and the English translation is extremely poor at times. With that said, there's enough interesting aspects to make this film worth watching. There's no question that it's quite unlike anything else that Lang was doing around this time unless his other lost films turn out to be like this. The film really seems like it could have influenced Luis Bunuel due to all the religious stuff here. There are some striking images including one of the Virgin Mary coming down a mountain as well as other scenes that take a look at religion. I've heard one person call this film something that Dreyer would make instead of Lang and I think that's a fair statement. Another thing that makes this worth viewing is the performance by May who is downright breath taking at times. I thought she did a marvelous job showing how tortured and frightened this woman was. The actress never has to overact and makes for a very interesting character and one that you really care for. The rest of the performances were decent at best so there's no question this belongs to May all the way. Also known as THE MOVING IMAGE, you can't help but hope that a complete print turns up at some point because it would undoubtedly make the film all the more interesting. There appear to be all sorts of subplots that have been cut out so I'm sure a complete print would help when it comes to figuring out the story.

A bit of a baffling film - actually more than a bit. This was Lang's second film and was thought lost for a while until a print turned up in Portugal in 1986. The title cards are in Portuguese but there are subtitles which you can download. Apparently two or three of the reels of the film are missing and I imagine that would make the film much more intelligible.

The heroine of the film has been in a relationship with a radical philosopher. He fakes his death at some point - perhaps to escape from society. This leaves her alone and she has a child. There is also an inheritance which she doesn't get but I'm not exactly sure the significance of this.

In any case, there is some good acting in the film, particularly from the lead actress and also from the lady villager who helps her. Lang is dealing with some very interesting material and probably the missing reels would clarify the questions I had. The quality of the print I saw was terrible and again, this only contributed to my confusion. It is an interesting film but it's really hard to authoritatively review it when you're so unsure as to motives.

I'd recommend it for fans of Lang, but you may be a bit confused.