Destiny, a.k.a. Der Müde Tod (The Weary Death) (Decla-Bioscop, 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, October 16) my husband Charles and I watched a film I’d been curious about literally for decades: a 1921 film by German director Fritz Lang (my choice for the greatest filmmaker of all time) originally titled Der Müde Tod, which means “The Weary Death.” In the English-speaking world it was called Destiny. It was written by Lang in collaboration with Thea Von Harbou, who was then married to actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge (who is in the film in two small but significant roles; later he’d play Dr. Mabuse, Attila the Hun in Kriemhild’s Revenge, Rotwang in Metropolis and Haghi in Spies, all for Lang) but was having an affair with Lang. (One office guy at Ufa Studios caught Lang literally fucking Von Harbou on his office desk.) The Wikipedia page on Destiny (also called Beyond the Wall in its initial American release, a reference to the impenetrable wall Death builds around his garden that only the dead can pass through) states that the film was inspired by the (East) Indian legend of Savitri, but to this viewer it came off more like the Orpheus and Eurydice myth with the leading character’s gender changed. A young woman (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari lead Lil Dagover – who’s name-checked in the 1971 film Cabaret as an actress Sally Bowles would like to emulate) and her lover (Walter Janssen) are traveling through the German countryside in a horse-drawn carriage. They stop to pick up a hitchhiker who turns out to be Death himself (Bernhard Goetzke), there to claim her boyfriend. She pleads with Death to spare him, and at one point she visits an apothecary (Karl Platen) and starts to drink a potion he has on sale that will kill her. Then she’s magically transported to the realm of Death, beyond an impregnable wall Death has built around a property which he’s just bought from the town’s council by offering them a price so high they literally can’t refuse.

Having read a passage from the Song of Solomon in the apothecary’s shop – the one that says, “Love is stronger than death” – she insists that Death spare her lover, and Death offers her a deal: he will give her three chances to save a person who’s otherwise doomed, in three different historical eras: a Muslim capital (probably either Mecca or Baghdad during the Caliphate), medieval Venice and Imperial China. If she can use the power of her love to save the life of one of the doomed people in these eras, she can have her boyfriend back to life. Lang has Lil Dagover and Walter Janssen play the leads in each of the sub-stories as well as the main part of the film, and in the Arab story she’s Zobiede, sister of the Caliph (Eduard von Winterstein). Only she’s having a clandestine affair with “The Frank,” who sneaks into the harem in drag even though he’s not only not a woman, he’s not a Muslim. When he’s caught, he’s sentenced to be buried alive, and the sentence is carried out by the caliph’s gravedigger, “El Mott” (also Bernhard Goetzke). Now that she’s one down, Death moves Our Heroine to Venice, where she’s Monna Fiammetta, forced into a marriage she doesn’t want with Girolamo (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) but really in love with Gianfrancesco (that’s right, Walter Janssen again). He shows up at Monna’s home in costume, but it’s a trap set by Girolamo, who tricks Monna into attacking her lover. Then Girolamo’s Moorish servant (Lewis Brody, who was apparently genuinely Black – he was born in what is now Cameroon when it was still a German colony – instead of a white actor in blackface, and he survived the Nazis and died in 1951) stabs Gianfrancesco in the back, and he dies.

Now down two for two, Our Heroine next ends up in ancient China as the female assistant to the great magician A Hi (Paul Biensfeldt). A Hi has been summoned by the Emperor (Károly Huszár) via a letter the length of a human being to entertain him, but the invitation contains a threat: if A Hi’s performance bores the Emperor, the Emperor will have him beheaded. In the film’s most famous special-effects sequence, once A Hi has read the letter it literally stretches to its full length and flies off. A Hi shows up at the Emperor’s court on a magic carpet (which seems to be a bit strange, since one would have expected this in the Arab sequence, not the Chinese one) and offers him a troop of fully alive miniature soldiers and a magic horse that gradually grows from toy-sized to full-length. But the Emperor wants A Hi’s female assistant, Tiao Tsien (Lil Dagover again), and is determined to have her even though that means he’ll have to knock off her boyfriend, Liang (Walter Janssen again). Tiao Tsien takes A Hi’s magic wand, turns A Hi into a cactus, the guards into pigs and Liang into a tiger, but the Emperor’s archer is able to shoot Liang in tiger guise. Tiao Tsien conjures up an elephant so she and Liang can escape, but the emperor’s archer catches up with them and shoots Liang to death.

Having lost all three of her chances to redeem her partner, we next see the woman in the apothecary’s shop, about to drink the death potion, when the apothecary knocks it from her hands. Death then offers her one more chance to save her lover’s life, but only if she can find a substitute victim willing to take his place. She enters a nursing home where the residents are sitting around kvetching about how they’ve lived too long and are anxious to die, but when they hear Our Heroine’s offer, they’re scared and run away. Then a fire starts in the nursing home and the residents are evacuated, but there’s still a baby inside. Our Heroine goes in to take the baby and offer it to Death as a substitute victim, but then she thinks better of it and can’t bring herself to make the baby’s mother suffer from the loss of her child. So she rescues the kid by passing the baby out of the burning nursing home in some sort of blanket instead of actually carrying it out, and Charles “read” the ending as her dying in the fire and thereby getting to join her lover in death since she’d been unable to do so in life, ending the film on one of those weird “the lovers are reunited in death” things 19th Century Romantic authors were very big on. The original German title comes from a line of dialogue (via an intertitle) in which Death himself laments how weary he is of his task. Three years after Destiny was made, Italian author Alfredo Casella would write a play, Death Takes a Holiday, which also dealt with Death getting tired of his dismal task and literally “taking a holiday,” during which terminally ill people just had to suffer in great pain because they were denied the opportunity of actually dying.

Destiny a.k.a. The Weary Death a.k.a. Beyond the Wall is not only a great film in its own right but a deeply influential one on subsequent filmmakers. Alfred Hitchcock called it his all-time favorite film (not at all surprising when you realize just how much of his mature style Hitchcock got from Lang!) and Spanish avant-garde director Luis Buñuel said, “When I saw Destiny, I suddenly knew that I wanted to make movies. It wasn’t the three stories themselves that moved me so much, but the main episode – the arrival of the man in the black hat (whom I instantly recognised as Death) in the Flemish village – and the scene in the cemetery. Something about this film spoke to something deep in me; it clarified my life and my vision of the world.” It is also probably the most impressive “effects movie” made to that time, and it had a macabre effect on the end of Thea Von Harbou’s career. Von Harbou stayed in Germany when the Nazis took over, while Lang left and made most of his subsequent films in the U.S. (with the annoying result that later critics have blamed the sillier aspects of their collaborations on her and credited the good stuff to him), and after the war she was briefly interned in a British camp before her release in 1947. In 1954 she was invited to attend a revival screening of Destiny in Berlin – and on her way out of the theatre she slipped, fell and died several days later of her injuries. And through much of the movie I found myself wishing that Lang had got to remake it in the sound era; the part of Death would have been perfect for Bela Lugosi.