THE TIGER OF ESCHNAPUR & THE INDIAN TOMB: 1959, Germany. Starring Debra Paget, Paul Hubschmid, Walter Reyer, Claus Holm, Luciana Paluzzi, Valéry Inkijinoff, Sabine Bethmann, René Deltgen, Jochen Brockmann, Richard Lauffen, Jochen Blume. Directed by Fritz Lang. Buy it from Amazon.

Yeah, I know we've maybe been laying on the Hammer horror films a bit thick lately, but it's only because we love them. But let's take a break and dive into something a little different. Now, as you have perhaps gathered if you've been with us since the beginning of this viewing blog (did I just call it a blog?), I love a good epic. I also tend to love bad epics, and epics that fall somewhere in between. Basically, as long as it contains people in tunics stabbing each other and racing chariots or simply parading across vast open landscapes accompanied by sweeping music, I'm probably going to be at least somewhat satisfied with the results. Generally, when one thinks of an epic, one thinks of Hollywood and their gloriously overblown historical productions of the 1960s. Those were good times, full of men in Roman armor, men proclaiming things from atop mountains, and lavishly choreographed scenes of scantily clad dancing girls. Hollywood has attempted a return to the epic, though with less vibrant color and no dancing girls, which is a big mistake if you ask me. And in recent years, China has made some headway when it comes to being considered a force for epics, with films like Emperor and the Assassin, Hero, and Warriors of Heaven and Earth matching the best Hollywood has to offer.


But when one thinks of the golden age of the epic, one might forget that other countries got in on the game as well. Germany, for instance. And it is from Germany that we get the sweeping two-part film known collectively as "Fritz Lang's Indian Epic." Lang's name should be familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in film, though it's almost always solely in connection with the silent era sci-fi masterpiece Metropolis. A fine film, but hardly his only contribution to the medium. Lang had tons of films to his name, very few of which beyond perhaps M and some of his American noirs ever get mentioned. Lang left his native Germany in protest and for a long time worked in America. Upon his return to his home and to German film making, his films became increasingly obscure in America. His first film after his return to German, a lavish, color-saturated epic set in India, was thought all but lost. Originally divided into two films -- The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb -- Lang's movie played in America only in a severely edited form courtesy of AIP that combined the two films into one incomprehensible mess called Journey to the Lost City. Lang's original version was thought lost to time until very recently, when a complete print of both films was discovered.


The adventure begins in The Tiger of Eschnapur, in which we meet intrepid German architect Harold Berger (Paul Hubschmid), newly arrived in India to undertake the building of a temple for Maharahaja Chandra (Walter Reyer). En route to the palace, he encounters a gorgeous half-breed dancer named Seetha (Debra Paget) who had an Irish mother and Indian father. When Harold faces down a man-eating tiger with the help of a little gift of the gods we call fire, he becomes a local hero and close friends with Chandra. This being an epic, it's obvious from the get-go that the woman will come between the two men, that they will have a falling out, and much running about will ensue. Sure enough, it happens. Seetha performs her alluring ritual dance, and all I can say is any religion that features as its holiest rite a mostly naked bombshell seductively dancing around and writing about the statue of their big-bosomed God can consider me a convert. I went briefly to a Methodist church as a kid, and I recall no such ritual. We just had to hear about bake sells. Well maybe I would have gone to the bake sell if the pastor had said, "And by the way, the local raven-haired beauty will strip down to a sparkling bikini and perform an undulating dance for the glory of God and Mrs. Miller's famous Brown Betty."

The dance is more than enough to snare the love of Chandra and Harold, who was forbidden to watch the dance but did it anyway. Scheming palace ne'er-do-wells see this as an opportunity to turn Chandra against his friend, and against Seetha, and eventually discredit him enough so that they can seize control. Harold is forced to fight a tiger in a secret arena, and is later banished to the desert. When he takes Seetha with her, Chandra swears revenge. Another set of German architects, one of whom is Harold's lovely sister, arrive just in time to be told they're now going to be building a tomb. Harold and Seetha are chased into the desert, collapse, and...


Hey! It was conceived to be a big-budget, color version of the old serials, kind of like Raiders of the Lost Ark decades later, but since it was made by Germans, without scenes of Nazis with exploding heads. The Tiger of Eschnapur ends on a cliffhanger, and since like those Lord of the Rings movies this is really one long movie split into separate films, The Indian Tomb picks up immediately where the action left off as Seetha and Harold are rescued from certain death and Harold's sister becomes increasingly suspicious that Chandra isn't telling her the truth about her brother's absence. Eventually, after hiding out in a cave for a while, Harold and Seetha are recaptured by Chandra's men, and the final confrontation draws nigh as the two former friends face off and Chandra faces the treachery of his devious advisers. Seetha performs another dance, even longer, sexier, and with even fewer clothes as she is forced to charm a snake or die by its bite. Really, you know, Seetha's two dance scenes are just about the greatest scenes filmed in the entire 1950s and most of the 1960s. Though she lacks the large number of backing dancers that got involved in other epic dancing girl numbers, what she does on screen will simply make your jaw drop, man or woman. It's a bit surprising that they could get away with skirting this close to nudity in the 1950s, but I guess, you know, Germany. They're weird over there. Still, it's not just the flesh; it's what you do with it, and Debra Paget knows exactly what to do with it. If there is a sexier scene fifteen years before or after, I've yet to see it.

But umm, where was I? There is more to these movies than Paget's dancing, though that will probably be the most memorable part. Working in color for one of his first times, Lang holds nothing back. India is possibly the most colorful country in the world anyway, and Lang brings that to the screen by bathing every scene in a super-saturated, hyper-vivid candy coating. Bava and Argento could only hope to soak their films in this much color. I sure do miss the days when not every film had to be shot in washed out blue and muted yellow-brown. Both The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb drip with color and are among the most gorgeous films ever shot. Lang handles every scene, every frame, like a painting, and leaves no detail unattended. These films are, in every sense of the word and then some, opulent. Set decoration and costuming is no less flamboyant. I can't comment exactly on how totally historically accurate everything is, but it sure is pretty to look at. Some of the sets, particularly those underground in the secret caves and catacombs, border on surreal and hearken back to the days of silent-era expressionism Lang himself helped pioneer.


What's really remarkable is that Lang seems to fill the screen with so much, yet his sets are generally wide open and rather sparsely decorated. It's how he shoots it, and how he uses color, lighting, and shadow as a prop, that fills in the air. Not everything is perfect -- tiger attack scenes do have a tendency to feature a rather unconvincing fake tiger or man in a tiger suit, but who really cares? Watching this giant two-part epic is like having the best and most exotic of Les Baxter albums acted out in your living room. It's not so much the realism that we're craving; it's grand spectacle, and Lang delivers this in spades.

Plotwise, Lang takes the age-old story of two men torn asunder by love of a woman and molds a perfect epic around it, full of all the sweeping social upheaval and revolution one expects from such a film. Though neither film features one of those "cast of thousands" battle scenes, there is still a cast of thousands on hand to make everything huge. And he throws everything in on top of the central love triangle. Tiger attacks, tiger hunts, fist fights, knife fights, sword fights, secret catacombs, secret doors, lusty dancing, elephants (but not lusty dancing elephants), sandstorms, assassins, intrigue, even an eerie underground leper colony. I mean, there's not much that the two films don't throw into the mix. At the end of day, they want nothing more than to be rollicking, old-fashioned adventure movies, and thanks to Lang for pulling it off on a grand and grandly enjoyable scale.


The sticking point for many people is going to be the fact that most of the actors are Germans or Germans in brownface. Well, why should they be any different than any other country? Around the same time, America was pasting fake eyelids onto Caucasians and calling them Chinese. And why be any more phased by the fact that all these Indians speak fluent German than you would by the same Indians speaking fluent English, albeit with the inevitable British accent everyone affects for historical epics? I think Lang's use of German actors in Indian roles is far more excusable than the same American practice. Although hearing them speak German reminds you how silly it is to impose our language on a people then find it funny when someone else does the same, the fact is that no one in Germany probably wanted to sit through a German movie acted out almost entirely in Hindi or Tamil. And frankly, Chinese American actors with good English weren't that hard to find in the 1950s, but we still didn't use them. Conversely, I bet that Indian actors fluent in German weren't exactly overflowing in the streets of Berlin.


In the end, what counts is that it doesn't much matter because each of the Germans in Indianface go about their task with such respect, and in such earnestness, that you quickly forget about both the face paint and the language. It doesn't take long before you forget that Chandra is being played by a guy named Walter and just start thinking of him as Chandra. That's what happens when actors are so committed to a role and invest their heart in it. The supporting cast is just as successful at making you forget they aren't really Indian. As for the non-Indians who are really supposed to be non-Indian, they acquit themselves fantastically as well. Paul Hubschmid is brilliant as Harold the two-fisted adventuring architect - an occupation that is probably symptomatic of Fritz Lang's own fascination with architects and draughtsmen and men who use compasses and protractors. Hey, a fightin' architect is no less a stretch than all those know-it-all fightin' scientists from sci-fi films. Our supporting Germans, Claus Holm and Sabine Bethmann, are fine too, though they really have very little to do than stumble around slack-jawed as the palace intrigue slowly reveals itself to them. Bethmann is a world-class beauty, but since she keeps her clothes on and never once wriggles about in the giant hand of a naked goddess statue, she's easier to overlook than Debra Paget's Seetha. Paget's acting job must be judges solely by her expressions and movements. In both the German language original and English track, she was dubbed by a different actress. Never the less, her performance is captivating, and her dancing - well, we've covered that, though I don't think one could ever overstate how glorious it is.

It's pretty obvious that I love this German Indian epic. Boasting sweeping Indian locations, sumptuous sets, fine performances, and imaginative direction, they're some of my favorite epics of all time. Lang nails the feel of old serial adventures in exotic lands perfectly, only bigger, more beautiful, and more breathtaking. It's the kind of filmmaking that makes you glad to be a film fan; the kind of storytelling that makes you want to jump up and cheer. So, bravo!

Labels: Bollywood, Historical Epics, Netflix Diary, Year: 1959