Last shouts: "Destination Unknown"

It may well be that, as old age takes its course, the number of Holocaust documentaries being produced diminishes; that this is more or less the final shout for those with first-hand experience of these nearly eight-decade-old events - even though the presence of actual, acknowledged fascists in the White House would seem to make their testimony more vital than ever. Claire Ferguson's Destination Unknown is modest in form - running to 81 minutes, compared to the hours Claude Lanzmann has logged on this subject over the years - and a little hazy in its organising principle, reaching out to a decidedly disparate roster of survivors: some who were based at Auschwitz, some Mauthausen, some Treblinka; some who knew Oskar Schindler and his devilish opposite Amon Goeth, many others who didn't. What Ferguson looks to be getting at is the range of people who were sent to the camps - from beardless boys to married couples - and the range of experiences they underwent there.

Several of Ferguson's subjects confess they succumbed to panic and hunkered down, believing that lowering one's head and following orders would be the only means of surviving this moment; others, however, vowed to stand their ground wherever possible, before gradually beginning to fight back; one man speaks movingly of how he was spared from the worst of the torture chambers by the intervention of another prisoner, never seen again. A focal point emerges in the form of Ed Mosberg, whom we first meet donning striped pyjamas and travelling to Mauthausen to aggressively push his story on the gathering tourists; the righteous hurt and anger sitting close to the surface of his performance art makes him an instantly more compelling figure than those interviewees sitting sedately in well-tended front parlours, and you can imagine an entire feature being constructed around his furious energies.

Elsewhere, as ever, it's those everyday details of life under the Nazi shadow that catch the ear: the youngster who sensed something was badly awry when he returned home from playing out to discover his beloved nanny had been disappeared, the survivor who hoped to erase his memories of the camps via the removal of his camp tattoo. (Not so easy: this evil went far beyond skin deep.) Schindler looms large in several interviews, as he has done over this chapter of history ever since Messrs. Keneally and Spielberg themselves intervened, although the stories Ferguson has gathered here serve to make an already extraordinary interlude - about workers looking in desperation to a capitalist to save them from fascism - seem more curious yet: the industrialist apparently told Helen Jonas (née Sternlicht) to remember the history of the Jews in Egypt, which hints he may have regarded himself as a latter-day Moses.

The whole emerges as a round-up, if that's not too triggering a word in this context, rather than a film building a thesis or towards some great revelation; for much of its running time, I found myself wondering whether these anecdotes could be reassembled in any order without any loss of force. (Ideally, we'd get a little less of Andrew Skeet's overworked score.) Still, plenty here could accurately be described as haunting: Jonas describing how her husband Joseph, whom she met on the day of Liberation, succumbed to a fatal depression, or Mosburg's wheelchair-bound, largely mute wife Cesia, who opens up only to detail her siblings' gruesome demises, and her desire to be reunited with them at the earliest available opportunity. Traces of this toxic horror persist into Ferguson's exteriors, shots of sunny, civilised, thoroughly 21st century European streets and byways that collectively invoke what we might call the Lanzmann paradox. It couldn't have happened here, your brain tells you. But it did.

Destination Unknown plays at the Curzon Soho this Thursday evening and at JW3 in West Hampstead on Sunday afternoon; both screenings will be followed by a Q&A.

So emotional: "Whitney: 'Can I Be Me?'"

If you're anything like me, you'll have two images of Whitney Houston fixed inside your head. One is of the vivacious twentysomething with frizzy hair who first registered in the world's consciousness in those dayglo videos for "How Will I Know?" and "I Wanna Dance with Somebody". This is the Whitney who ended up on countless bedroom walls in poster form; who inspired one of the first KLF experiments, and inspired Serge Gainsbourg to new levels of televised lechery. The other is of a Whitney I never saw, but who may be all too vividly imagined: the Whitney nearing the end of her tragically short life, haunting that suite at the Beverly Hills Hilton in early 2012, surrounded by drug paraphernalia, a bath running somewhere off-camera. With Whitney: "Can I Be Me?", the documentarists Nick Broomfield and Rudi Dolezal strive to dig out the images that make up the rest of this picture, and which might answer that title question, among others. Such as: how did somebody raised as a devout Christian wind up on crack as she neared her fiftieth year? And perhaps most crucially of all: where did all that vivacity, the light and joy in her eyes, finally go?

Broomfield, of course, has form with pop postmortems, yet the first thing to be said about "Can I Be Me?" is that it's altogether more conventionally composed than his conspiratorially minded investigations into the deaths of Kurt Cobain and Tupac Shakur. Talking heads are spliced together with (rare, and often revealing) archive; although Broomfield can be heard in several places asking follow-up questions of Whitney's friends, colleagues and entourage, he remains off-screen throughout, acknowledging, perhaps, that this is not his story. The question flagged by the title is just whose story this actually is. So it is that "Can I Be Me?"'s first half pays lip service to its subject's imperious, showstopping voice and rapid success, but the film frames Houston almost from the off as a product of a particularly corporate moment, and very much at the mercy of the music industry's machinations: marketed incessantly in conjunction with her illustrious relatives (mom Cissy, aunt Dionne Warwick), produced in such a way as not to sound too black. Enormous success followed, as did a not inconsiderable backlash from within the African-American community.

Very quickly, a fatalistic mood is established: even those early glory years - the bestselling debut album, more consecutive #1s than the Beatles, the transfer to the silver screen with 1992's The Bodyguard (approached, drolly, via an interview with Houston's actual minder David Roberts) - are parsed for signs of the tragedy to come. The editorial line Broomfield and Dolezal adopt insists that it must simply have been very hard for the singer, prone as she was to self-esteem issues, to feel as though she'd accomplished anything for herself. One especially needling biographical detail is that Houston first met Bobby Brown - her on-off partner for the last twenty years of her life - at the very same Soul Train Awards at which she was booed by the audience for perceived inauthenticity; and if ever there was an illustration of the vagaries of the human heart, you might want to consider how a poised, bright and thoroughly upright former choirgirl ended up on the arm of this slouching, swaggering, barely coherent ne'er-do-well. (I mean, I like "My Prerogative" as much as the next guy, but c'mon.) The pair's first public appearances were, in the gospel according to Nick and Rudi, the last glimmers of light before Houston began circling the plughole. 

Throughout its ninety minutes, you can feel "Can I Be Me?" placing unusual emphasis on previously unseen footage of its subject's European concert tour of 1999, describing it as the singer's last successful endeavour. (The voice was shortly to enter into terminal decline, diminished by some very free and easy living; a throwaway caption informs us Houston had already overdosed on cocaine after the filming of Waiting to Exhale in 1995.) This leaves the directors with thirteen years to fill - a horrifying void in which the world barely heard a squeak out of the singer, save for whatever the supermarket tabloids chose to report. What Broomfield and Dolezal uncover here is a behind-the-scenes battle for that showbusiness perennial, control: on one side, Robyn Crawford, Houston's PA, oldest friend and rumoured lover, determined to keep this show on the road; on the other, Bobby, holding up the promise of a wedding ring and the stimulants that made his boo feel better about the world for a moment (or at least forget his philandering). We know who won and who lost - although the tragedy assumes an extra, crushing dimension when Bobbi Kristina toddles on from the sidelines during that 1999 tour, collateral damage waiting to happen.

Although the lawyers have clearly been over it with a fine-toothed comb - you may feel the still-extant Brown gets off lightly in this telling, and Ray J is mentioned not at all - Broomfield's journalistic influence is felt in the unflinching depiction of this descent: it's telling that, after documenting the early highs (and there's one properly astounding clip of Houston's debut as a 19-year-old on The Tonight Show), the film dials back the music to deal in the grim and grubby facts. That makes "Can I Be Me?" a very different proposition from 2015's Amy, a film couched on some level as a two-hour, multiplex-friendly memorial concert; what we're offered here is no more or less than a bracing lesson, a warning from showbiz history - one that realises that so much pop culture is at best optimistic fantasy, pitched to us by those looking to turn a fast and sharp buck, regardless of the consequences. In The Bodyguard, Houston had the dashing white knight Kevin Costner to step in and save her from a would-be assassin's bullets; in reality, Whitney fired her minder after he raised doubts with her management that she might have started running with the wrong crowd. Bittersweet memories; that is all I'm taking with me. Had it been heard in this bleak context, "I Will Always Love You" might have started to sound like the first draft of a suicide note.  

Whitney: "Can I Be Me?" opens in selected cinemas from Friday. 

From the archive: "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"

Of all the movies to have emerged from the Marvel universe, 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger surely ranked towards the back of the pack: a joblot of origin-story exposition phoned in by actors searching out a sizeable payday, it mostly felt like a placeholder tossed out to sustain brand visibility while the writers figured out what to do with a character who might seem archaic indeed in the era of Robert Downey Jr.’s postmodern snark machine Tony Stark.

The first film’s romantic interest, Hayley Atwell’s Peggy Carter, shows up under old-age latex at the beginning of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and speaks the line that sets the agenda for this inevitable sequel: “All we can do is our best, and sometimes the best we can do is start over.” Now finally unburdened of all that guffy backstory and free to exist in the moment, the franchise here rebuilds itself almost from scratch.

The new film has do-over directors in the generally engaging Anthony and Joe Russo (Welcome to Collinwood, Arrested Development) and a script from the satirically inclined pair of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely (Pain & Gain) that ponders how modern-day Washington might look to a soldier who’s had the good fortune to skip Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and might therefore have some untarnished idea of what it means to fight the good fight.

The Cap’n himself (Chris Evans) is still trying to catch up on everything he’s missed – an early insert shot of his pocketbook (its suck-ups presumably localised for each territory) suggests the 1966 World Cup final is on his playlist – and growing increasingly ambivalent about the brute-force militarism that calls on him to do all his country’s dirty work. His doubts come to a head after S.H.I.E.L.D. is compromised, forcing him outside the normal chains of command, and turning the film into an inside-the-Beltway conspiracy thriller.

For in everything from its plotting to its car-crunching action sequences to a final-reel plunge into the deep, this instalment has clearly been inspired by the Bourne movies: enduring liberal totem Robert Redford assumes what we might call the David Strathairn role, lending renewed class to proceedings as the duplicitous Senator overseeing the Government’s latest expensive weapons program.

And if the ploddingly literal first movie dealt with who Captain America is, this follow-up is a good deal more imaginative about exploring what the character might represent in the modern world: namely, the last good cop standing between order and lawlessness, his shield a glossy inflation of Gary Cooper’s sheriff’s badge in High Noon.

Given the duality the Captain assumes here – simultaneously authority figure and troubled outcast – it still seems something of a shame that the series should have been founded on Evans’ largely one-note, Ken-doll blandness: though he and his biceps have become more adept at filling the screen, the role insists on stripping the actor of even the throwaway one-liners that were offered up as a personality for the Human Torch in those flimsy Fantastic Four movies.

And perhaps it behoves us not to get overexcited about a micro-myth – a tiny piece of a wider universe and business model, to be slotted into a repackaged Blu-Ray boxset at a later date – that spends this much money merely to divert us all for another two-and-a-bit hours, and which winds up clanking around on the same gantry flooring as every other Avengers movie to date.

As a standalone, though, The Winter Soldier is surprising – working its way through the death of a key recurring character, and heading towards a last-reel transformation you really won’t see coming – and the Russos find deft ways to balance the kind of cranked-up action that sells tickets with the character interplay that has sustained the comics for decades. The franchise (should that be sub-franchise?) has been given shape and purpose: it suddenly feels like more than just a recruiting poster pinned to a sixpack.

(MovieMail, March 2014)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier screens on BBC1 tonight at 10.30pm.

Gal power: "Wonder Woman"

Even by the standards of the trumpeted-to-high-heaven latter-day comic-book movie, Wonder Woman has been keenly anticipated. Then again, this was pitched and received as no ordinary comic-book movie, being not just the first in the recent run of DC/Marvel "universe"-builders to be centred on a female superhero - traditionally box-office poison (think Tank Girl, Catwoman, Aeon Flux) - but the first to be directed by a woman: Patty Jenkins, elevated from the career purgatory she was left in following 2003's widely admired indie Monster. (Compare and contrast with the career progression of such fanboys as Jordan Vogt-Roberts and Colin Trevorrow, fast-tracked to major studio paydays within weeks of their debut Sundance sensations.) 

The biggest hope, among the hopeful, is that WW's success can be parlayed into more diverse blockbusters, films with kickass heroines, overseen by previously overlooked directors; that some of that major studio lucre will reach your Andrea Arnolds and Lynne Ramsays and revolutionise the way this most male of industries operates. That sounds suspiciously to me like putting one's faith in trickledown economics, the great lie of our times: as it is, the presence of current US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin among the credited producers ensures that Wonder Woman will be one of the year's few films to directly profit a member of that same Trump administration that has spent recent months assiduously dismantling female healthcare and planned-parenthood programs. Not for the first time, a superhero movie has invited us to think of the world in simple good/bad terms; that world, however, remains a far trickier place to interpret than our social media feeds would suggest.

In as much as Wonder Woman might be approached as a mere film rather than a flagpole for the Woke Citizens of Twitter to rally around, it proves unexpectedly engaging - nothing too radical, certainly, but proof that distaff directors are every bit as capable as their male colleagues at delivering proficient if naggingly weightless and arguably overlong spectacle to expectant Friday and Saturday night crowds. This is, inevitably, an origin story, which means that it skews towards the exposition and fan service that has sunk several recent high-profile event movies - it opens with a delivery from Wayne Enterprises, and concludes with its heroine penning a thank-you email to Batman - but Jenkins spends these two-and-a-bit hours building worlds that are at least enjoyable to hang out in.

For starters, there is Amazonia, an unspoiled, land-that-time-forgot idyll where the athletic young daughters of the Gods - among them Gal Gadot's Diana - are schooled in horseriding and hand-to-hand combat. Not even this matriarchal, girls-only bliss is entirely secluded from the ways of men, however. One day, the landscape - or at least the airspace - is breached by a mere mortal: Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), an American spy shot down by German fighter pilots, having snaffled crucial intelligence from the laboratory of minion-shooting Kaiser chief Ludendorff (Danny Huston). After initial suspicion, our heroine elects to accompany Steve back to his world - a world at war, or rather a comic-book idea of the world at war - to set things right; her honed and supple muscle tone is, it turns out, nothing compared to her conscience.  

This central pairing turns out to be the film's strongest suit: it's the dreamer and the realist, joshing, brushing up against and undercutting each other's worldview as they go. Pine, becoming more likeable with age, makes Steve a battle-hardened sceptic, shrugging his way through a conflict he describes as "a great big mess"; Gadot's Diana, operating under the belief the War is the doing of the Gods and not just men, insists she's the only one capable of sorting this mess out. In drizzly, smoky wartime London, where Steve is based, she appears as much a fish-out-of-water (and as much a force for possible good) as Amy Adams' princess in Enchanted - conflating the definition of a secretary with that of a slave, to the amusement of clerical workers everywhere - although her training keeps showing through: she quotes Socrates in the original Greek, and takes out fistfuls of double agents with her burning lasso of truth.

The surprise is how light it is, and perhaps this is the advantage of bringing a woman's touch to bear on this sort of material. Jenkins goes easier on the clunking plot mechanics and willywaggling CGI of these things; she cuts briskly through those sweaty male explanations of where this character gets her headband and armguards from, while clearing space on her lavishly appointed sets for characterful performers (David Thewlis, Ewen Bremner, Said Taghmaoui, Lucy Davis) to have the kind of fun that transfers easily to an audience in the right mind. She knows how to make the action stirring, if only by embracing the absurdity of such moments as Diana strutting unmolested through No Man's Land as if she were modelling the new Donna Karan line; she gets the symbolism of Steve's all-male platoon forming a platform with sheet metal so our heroine can leap into a clock tower and neutralise a German sniper.

Yet she also makes narrative sense of the film's multiple endings, in a way many blockbuster directors, pushing onwards for bigger and better spectacle, haven't: Diana believes that killing the Big Bad who pops up at the end of her two-hour pursuit will put an end to her and Steve (and by extension the world)'s struggles; we get a further twenty minutes only after it's become apparent that it won't. The character as encountered here is bad-ass, but she's also as naive as some of her most fervent online cheerleaders, becoming more human by the end of the movie than the dark-eyed warrior princess we first meet back in Amazonia. (In a show of empathy with sensitive multiplex-goers, she develops a touch of tinnitus from all the explosions being set off around her, which is something Black Widow has never confessed to.)

Viewers of a certain age might still prefer the softer cut of Lynda Carter's jib than Gadot's cold, hard metallic carapace, which ties into this very corporate enterprise's generally steely palette. (To be fair, she is required to take a lot more flak than her predecessor ever did.) And, for all that the wonder women on my timeline might wish otherwise, I wonder whether the boardrooms of Hollywood are now configured such that the capitalism inherent in this Wonder Woman is destined to trump its feminism: that the brand is the key, the personnel secondary, leaving this franchise - whatever it costs, whatever it grosses - liable to be handed back to screenwriter Zack Snyder soon enough. Let's not allow that to diminish Jenkins' achievement here, though: she's ventured into battle and come back with a victory of sorts, an origins movie that - beneath the fuss and noise - leaves you keen to see more. It is, at the very least, a start.

Wonder Woman is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of June 2-4, 2017:

1 (new) Wonder Woman (12A) ***
2 (new) Baywatch (15)
3 (1) Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar's Revenge (12A) **
4 (2) Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul (U) **
5 (3) Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (12A) **
6 (4) Alien: Covenant (15)
7 (7) The Boss Baby (U)
8 (5) King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (12A)
9 (8) Secret Cinema: Moulin Rouge! (12A)
10 (6) Snatched (15)

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five: 
1. My Life as a Courgette
2. The Red Turtle
3. Destiny/Der Müde Tod
4. The Shepherd
5. Wonder Woman


Top Ten DVD rentals: 

1 (1) Hacksaw Ridge (15) ****
2 (new) Passengers (12) **
3 (4) Rogue One (12) **
4 (3) Lion (12) ***
5 (6) Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (12) ***
6 (7) Sully: Miracle on the Hudson (12)
7 (5) La La Land (12) ***
8 (8) Trolls (U)
9 (9) Ballerina (U) ***
10 (re) Manchester by the Sea (15) ****

(source: lovefilm.com)

My top five: 
1. Toni Erdmann
2. The Salesman
3. Who's Gonna Love Me Now?
4. Hacksaw Ridge
5. Manchester by the Sea


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Parenthood [above] (Monday, ITV1, 10.40pm)
2. The Fighter (Friday, C4, 12.55am)
3. Dance, Girl, Dance (Saturday, BBC2, 7am)
4. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Saturday, five, 3.10am)
5. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Sunday, BBC1, 10.30pm)

"The Shack" (Catholic Herald 09/06/17)

The initial wave of faith-based movies – those medium-to-low budget dramas boosted by evangelical in-church word-of-mouth – diminished quickly in the wake of 2014’s expert-defying God’s Not Dead (budget: $2m, take: $60m). The studios swiftly entered the temple, and while that same year’s Heaven is for Real boasted a modicum of cinematic nous, few claims could be made for last year’s Miracles from Heaven, or indeed the inevitable God’s Not Dead 2 (budget: $5m, take: $20m), which existed merely to underline how its predecessor was box-office lightning in a bottle. Religion and commerce remained uneasy bedfellows.

With The Shack (***, 12A, 132 mins), this week’s adaptation of Canadian author William Young’s bestseller, we find the faith sector seeking salvation. Young’s tale of a man confronting his demons in a lakeside retreat occupied by a holy trinity wasn’t originally intended as megaplex fare. Written as a Christmas gift for the author’s children, it only went into publication when preachers Wayne Jacobsen and Brad Cummings figured the story’s spiritual struggles might appeal to churchgoers. They did – and lo, the book became a minor sensation, logging years on the New York Times chart and garnering plaudits from no less a storyteller than Stephen King.

As copies passed between pews, The Shack sparked a doctrinal controversy Young surely didn’t envisage when his offspring first unwrapped his words. Some raised eyebrows at the depiction of God as a cheery African-American woman (Young: “I was trying to get as far away from that ‘Gandalf-with-a-bad-attitude’ God as I could”); others decried the decision to mark her with Christ-like stigmata. Heresy, or just a novel way of suggesting God’s empathy – that this deity literally feels their children’s pain? Several fulminating YouTube broadsides insist it’s the former; one problem with writing this allusive is that it invites unintended interpretations.

The film, certainly, feels defensive early on. As our narrator Willie (country star Tim McGraw, a reassuring presence for US audiences) puts it, “What I’m about to tell you is a little… well, a lot on the fantastic side. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.” It is, essentially, a question of belief. For Young, faith offers the possibility of an escape from hardship: when protagonist Mack (Avatar’s Sam Worthington) first receives his invite to the shack – signed, somewhat cryptically, “Papa” – he’s living alone and stubbly in a frozen-over shell of the home he once shared with his picture-perfect family.

Director Stuart Hazeldine’s deployment of the snow machine in this cold, harsh reality makes the Narnia movies look restrained, but then this cycle of movies has traditionally tacked towards extremes, leaving credibility behind. A flashback shows the young Mack being beaten by his actual father – more hardship – in a deluge that might give Noah pause for thought. The film doubles down on this notion of faith as a shelter from any storm – with some narrative justification, for it transpires that Mack has endured his youngest child’s murder, a tragedy that might well drive a man into seclusion.

The commitment is evident throughout the (long) running time. The Shack boasts better production values than its predecessors in this field, stretching to recognisable performers and functional visual effects – always a boon, whenever a film touches upon the miraculous – but it’s also a far more forgiving and inclusive endeavour than God’s Not Dead. Out at the lake, our troubled hero is nudged towards making his peace with the world by the most diverse Trinity ever assembled: our distaff Papa (The Help’s Octavia Spencer) joined by an Israeli Jesus (Avraham Aviv Alush) and a Japanese Holy Spirit (model-turned-actress Sumire Matsubara).

If that sounds strange, it’s exactly that strangeness that grabs you: rarely can God have moved quite this mysteriously on screen. For starters, with its themes of infanticide and despair, this is simply a very odd story for a father to have penned for his children – and even if you accept it as an introduction to those trials awaiting us in the adult world, The Shack keeps defying established cinematic logic. Take the shack itself: a curious albeit vividly evoked safe space, all abundant scatter cushions, congenial company and bottomless apple pie. Is it God-given? Or is Mack just undergoing a really restorative Airbnb experience?

Not even a zealot could deny its flaws. The dialogue often clunks, and there may be no cutting around Worthington’s air of balsawood, no matter that this makes him an effective vessel for any teaching. (When led out onto the lake, he doesn’t walk on water; he floats.) Yet The Shack works in some small, peculiar way so long as it keeps returning to sights like Spencer kneading the daily bread while merrily listening to reggae. As images of God go, it’s unconventional – wasn’t the Devil supposed to have all the best tunes? – but like much else about The Shack, phenomenon and film, not altogether uncheering.

The Shack is now playing in selected cinemas.

Silent and deadly: "Destiny/Der Müde Tod"

What do we know of Fritz Lang's silent work? Metropolis, which has become the go-to title, in more or less constant circulation since its turn-of-the-millennium restoration; occasionally, the still tremendously exciting Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler will resurface from the underground in which it lingers. Beyond that, however, much has been lost, which makes Destiny/Der Müde Tod a valuable rediscovery: here is a new print, tinted as per Lang's original instruction, of the 1921 opus subtitled "a folk song in six verses". Despite rhyming title cards, the framework is actually that of a horror film - Lang's own Caligari or Nosferatu - about a village literally stalked by death. A mysterious stranger (the most upright Bernhard Goetze) shows up in a quiet berg, buys a plot of land adjacent to the cemetery, and begins sneaking the locals out of sight - for, as is evident from the German title, if not its generalised English translation, this sombre, cowled figure is the Grim Reaper himself, grown weary of his labours, heading out to something like pasture, yet keen to take a few more souls along with him.

Somewhere in its cosmology, there exists an inkling of Lang's later obsession with societies that corrupt themselves: we learn there was some debate among the village elders over the wisdom of allowing this outsider to purchase this plot, but "the money was too tempting". Yet the overall sweep is capital-R Romantic. This Reaper finds a worthy opponent in a young bride (Lil Dagover) who insists that love is stronger than death, and proceeds to tell three stories that might prove it, with the aim of sparing her swain. At which point, the film takes on a distinct Arabian Nights flavour - the first tale is set somewhere in the Middle East, with Metropolis's mad scientist Rudolf Klein-Rogge credited as "The Dervish" - but also an air of that keystone portmanteau Intolerance, albeit stripped of Griffith's lofty pretensions and longueurs.

The stop-start, patchwork format means it doesn't quite have the immediate narrative grip and thrust of this director's later projects: it's still inchoate Lang, trying on different genres, costumes, even title fonts for size, and - as with Griffith's Broken Blossoms, another potential influence - we now have to turn a forgiving eye to the Orientalism of the bride's third story. Still, certain images and ideas leap out at us, a century on from their first inscription: this Reaper presides over a chamber of candles that stand for the lives of men, waiting to burn or be snuffed out. And it's hard not to be struck and impressed by the sight of a relatively young filmmaker covering so many bases in the course of ninety minutes, already determining to push the boundaries of his art. His Death may be tired, but Lang himself was only just warming up.

Destiny/Der Müde Tod opens in selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD release on July 17.