Category: Drama

Fritz Lang’s first five surviving films are largely workmanlike films that seem to be chasing simple pleasures of popular genre. Destiny, Lang’s seventh film, is outright art. Part of a small subgenre of dramas of the era (like Leaves from Satan’s Book by Dreyer) heavily inspired by DW Griffith’s Intolerance that told interrelated tales across… Continue reading Destiny

Another movie with male twins fighting over a woman with a heavy use of flashbacks. It’s kind of like an improved version of The Wandering Shadow. This is the first of Lang’s films in this early period where I feel like his skills have actually improved from one film to the next. The filmmaking is… Continue reading Four Around the Woman

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,… Continue reading The Wandering Shadow

In the end, I think I may be a bit more kind to the whole of Harakiri than I should be, but the ending refocuses a lot of what came before, giving it a power that the rest of the film didn't seem all that interested in pursuing. It's still not good, but I think… Continue reading Harakiri (1919)