Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic Looks Great And Rips Along

It wasn’t Breaking Dawn or Harry Potter that invented the idea of releasing a film in two parts. Neither was it The Weinsteins when they cleaved Kill Bill asunder. It’s actually been going on an awfully long time. Long enough that director Fritz Lang managed to do it a few times, scattered across pretty much the entire length of his career.

His first two-parter was The Spiders, an adventure romp in an exotic setting, released in 1919 and 1920. His last was The Indian Epic, an adventure romp in an exotic setting, released in 1959. There were several other double pictures along the way. I guess he really liked the format, not to mention adventure romps and exotic settings.

Indeed, it could be said that he really liked this particular adventure romp and exotic setting, because Lang was a screenwriter on a previous film version of the story, almost forty years before. That original version was ultimately directed by Joe May, but Lang had been originally set to take the reins before being bumped, and his contributions were always well credited and respected.

The source for both versions was Thea von Harbou’s novel, The Indian Tomb. Lang and Harbou married, and I’m not sure if his dedication to realising the story on film was not some kind of tribute to her. I might even draw a parallel to the film’ storyline, which revolves around the construction of a shrine so beautiful it would put the Taj Mahal in the shade.

Eureka are releasing a beautiful DVD presentation of The Indian Epic this week. Unfortunately, there’s no blu-ray version,* and my preparation for this review marks the first time I’ve watched a standard definition disc for some months. Of course, the film looks tremendous and after just a few short minutes, I had settled down and accepted it for what it is.

To be a bit more precise about “what it is”, just for a second, it’s an Academy ratio film transfered with some sensitivity from nice, clean prints. It’s handsome.

Despite being a melodrama, and one fueled by passion, love and lust (at once, really, with little distinction necessary between them) the film’s success is less in its character interplay than in its abundance of pulpy, reel-burning storytelling. There’s a lot of plot here, and Lang powers through it. The films take a love triangle between Walter Reyer as a maharajah, Paul Hubschmid as a Western architect he hires to build the Indian tomb of the title, and Debra Paget as a mixed race ritual dancer that both of the fellas want, then makes the three of them go through a series of big adventure moments, with wild tigers, secret chambers, epic chases, and deadly sandstorms. This is the kind of story where internal passions boil over and find expression as lurid, adventure serial escapades.

I feel that the tone and style of the film might have benefited from wider images, if not full-on cinemascope, but that’s not a format Lang seems to have ever mastered, so perhaps I should be grateful that he does good work with the squarer compositions he’s using. There’s some good up-and-down stuff, with tall statues and high-ceilinged sets, people clambering vertically up cracks, and so on, as well as characters almost pushed into one another’s arms by the edges of the frame.

Comparing the film’s colour to that of other, similar romantic melodramas from top-tier talents (I’m looking at you, The Archers) doesn’t really do the Indian Epic any favours. On the other hand, comparing it to the sheer mass of technicolour movies shot in the 40s and 50s, finds it holding up rather well. As shot by cinematographer Richard Angst, the spread of colour across the frame, and indeed the film, is a bit of a paste, not using much clear delineation at all, rarely making anything of colour contrasts. Eureka are certainly offering up a nice presentation of the images, however, and what we see on disc is definitely better than what the majority of cinemagoers would have witnessed on release as the prints got battered, scratched and faded within just a few weeks of screening.

I might have some issues with the films’ Orientalist representations, but the characters are as three dimensional as the breathless melodrama will allow – so, sort of 2.5D. Above all else, it’s good that the film is preserved, no matter the political context it was produced in, and that may have influenced it, because the alternative would be, as ever, the dimming of historical perspective.

Fully suitable for a Sunday afternoon and then, with a quick swap of the discs, that Sunday early evening too, Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic is much less authentically Indian than it is epic, but is wall-to-wall Lang. I couldn’t resist it.

The DVD, complete with an informative, steady commentary by All Day Entertainment’s David Kalat, a brief documentary on the film’s making and a few minutes of silent 8mm footage shot by the actress Sabine Bethmann when on location, is available now.

Just a quick note: these are Region 2 PAL discs, as with most UK releases, but we’re all equipped for all regions, right? Being film buffs and all.

*Not yet, anyway. Nothing is confirmed, but there’s talk of a blu-ray version down the way, if we’re lucky and the source materials can be properly secured. It’s flimsy enough a possibility that you might not want to wait, however.