Destiny (1921)

Fritz Lang may have immersed himself in German culture with his Siegfried and Kriemhilde's Revenge, but he was never more Germanic anywhere than he was with Destiny. Inspired by a childhood dream, this grim yet entertaining story about life-and-death, and the struggle to overcome the latter, never quite escapes its origins, in terms of a somber tone and caste to its plot and characters -- indeed, it is as self-consciously German as Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (with which it has much in common) is self-consciously Swedish. It's easy to understand how other filmmakers, most especially Douglas Fairbanks Sr. as a producer (on The Thief of Bagdad), would have lifted much of Destiny's form and images, but little of its substance. The movie still holds up, but it is a little tougher to absorb than, say, Lang's Nibelungen films, lacking a conventional heroic presence or story-arc for audiences to grab onto. Indeed, in many ways, the work it most closely resembles thematically is Harold S. Buquet's On Borrowed Time (1939), which has a somewhat similar resolution. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide