The Indian Tomb

Fritz Lang – 1959 – Germany 
  

Known informally as Fritz Lang’s ‘Indian Epic,’ the two films The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb (a.k.a. Tomb of Love), released a few weeks apart in early 1959, marked the beleaguered Lang’s quasi-triumphant return to his homeland after decades away since the rise of the Third Reich.  Mostly available internationally in a 90-minute incarnation known as Journey to the Lost City, it didn’t enjoy much of a reputation over the years thanks to the proliferation of dull prints and the truncated version’s eradication of Lang’s careful pacing and construction.  In its true form, (what I will call simply) The Indian Tomb is a 3-1/2- hour exotic, lush and mystical adventure, but more importantly a strong testament from Lang, so late in his career, asserting his belief in the ideals of ‘pure cinema’ he’d avowed since the 1910s and 20s.  Lang was a member of the 2nd generation of movie directors, a group who matured along with film, absorbing each of its advancements in turn; sound, color, widescreen, etc.; a phenomenon which I believe produced a special rigor and soundness of design that is largely lost on subsequent generations who had film handed to them already fully evolved.  A modest contrast to other period epics of the day that had either a religious or historical (but in any case moralistic) angle – Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960), etc., Lang’s penultimate film is actually a remake of a 1919 version of the same story, also released in two parts, that Lang was involved with but did not direct.  With his eyesight failing and years past any box-office clout, Hollywood had no interest in the cantankerous director’s eccentric films – (who else could have made diverse oddities like Rancho Notorious (1952), The Big Heat (1953) and Moonfleet (1955) in such a short time?).  More-or-less involuntarily retired in the late 50s, he received an unexpected invitation from German producer Artur Brauner to direct his planned remake of The Indian Tomb.  Lang returned home with mixed feelings; he’d been considered a traitor since fleeing for America in the early 30s, along with many other important expatriate directors like Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger.  In crafting the film, Lang, free of the many constraints he endured in Hollywood, used the opportunity to show the world he was still capable of the marvelous visionary epics that had made him famous in the 20s; films like Die Nibelungen (1924) and Metropolis (1926).  The Indian Tomb has a concreteness and symmetry to it that is almost maddening, and a concentric logic that seems to point to the heart of the secrets of cinema itself.  The montage flows in a hypnotic rhythm and the mise-en-scene of individual shots, (almost all of them, in fact), is unfailingly pleasing to the eye; perfect in a way that is simultaneously satisfying and disturbing.  In the Indian kingdom of Eschnapur, the maharajah is beset with political turmoil and conspiring generals.  Meanwhile, a European architect is summoned to design hospitals for the city’s infirm, who are presently kept in an underground cavern, but is sidetracked by the maharajah’s new plan for him to instead construct a massive sepulcher in which the subject of his unrequited love, a temple dancer, is to be entombed alive.  The stringency of Lang’s style will probably be a bit off-putting to modern audiences, but I believe that this level of architectural aesthetic quality is something that should be recaptured if possible; it is not a lower plateau that has been superseded or improved upon; it was merely dismissed by younger critics and filmmakers who could neither achieve it nor fathom it.  The Indian Tomb is the work of a master at the absolute height of his powers.  I find it no coincidence that 1959 was also the year of other staggering masterpieces by members of Lang’s generation; Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, Hawks’ Rio Bravo, Ozu’s Good Morning and Floating Weeds, Bresson’s Pickpocket, Buñuel’s Nazarin, and a handful of others.  In fact, I’ve often thought of 1958-59 as the moment in which the cinema achieved perfection and began its slow decline as the masters retired and passed away over the next two decades.