The Spiders (1919-20)

The Spiders (Die Spinnen) is one of Fritz Lang’s earliest films. The original intention was to make four linked feature films. Only two were completed - The Golden Sea (Der goldene See) in 1919 and The Diamond Ship (Das Brillantenschiff) in 1920. Both were written and directed by Lang. The great Karl Freund did the cinematography on part 2.

These two movies combine action and adventure in exotic locales with romance and intrigue.

I think it’s fair to say that Lang’s movies became more complex and interesting when he started collaborating with Thea von Harbou. She added a bit more psychological depth. Having said that there are still plenty of distinctive Langian themes and Langian touches in this very early movie.

The hero of The Golden Sea is playboy sportsman Kay Hoog. He is about to compete in a major yacht race when he finds a message in a bottle. The message was written by a Harvard professor who vanished five years earlier. The message speaks of a lost civilisation and hidden treasure, and gives the geographical location in which both can be found. This appeals to Kay Hoog’s sense of adventure and sportsmanship a lot more than a yacht race. He sets off in pursuit of the treasure although it’s reasonable to assume that the adventure attracts him more than the treasure.

He discovers a lost remnant of the Inca Empire. There is plenty of gold, but also plenty of danger. The Incas still practise human sacrifice and Kay might well be the next sacrifice.

He also rescues a beautiful Inca high priestess, Naela (Lil Dagover). They fall in love. The fly in the ointment is that she’s the who will have to offer Kay as a sacrifice to the sun god.

His other problem is the Spiders, a secret and ruthless criminal society who are also after that gold. His particular problem is the leader of the Spiders, the glamorous but wicked Lio Sha (Ressel Orla). He doesn’t yet know just how dangerous a woman she is.

Kay and Naela have lot of narrow escapes. There are exciting action sequences. There are some splendid visuals. The sets and costumes are impressive.

Lil Dagover makes a fine heroine. And Lio Sha is convincingly devious.

Kay is determined to escape and to take Naela with him.

In The Diamond Ship Kay Hoog and the Spiders have some unfinished business to attend to.

At stake in this episode is a diamond in the shape of the head of Buddha. Stolen 400 years earlier it is believed to be the key to restoring Asian greatness and independence from the European great powers. Lio Sha and the Spiders want that diamond. So does Kay Hoog.

The search takes Kay into the hidden Chinese city beneath the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Lio Sha has embarked on the ship Storm Bird.

There’s a kidnapping and there are exciting chases through hidden passageways, betrayals and plenty of gunplay.

The Spiders anticipates thematic elements that would appear in Lang’s slightly later movies. The sinister secret criminal organisation, the shadowy conspiracies and the hints of paranoia would be quite at home in Dr Mabuse: The Gambler (1922) and Spies (1928).

There’s a fascination with secret worlds and also with technology (which would play such a large rôle in Lang movies such as Metropolis and Woman in the Moon).

To appreciate this movie fully you need to know something of the popular culture landscape of the time. Diabolical criminal masterminds were all the rage. The first great example of the breed, Dr Nikola, had been created by Australia writer Guy Boothby in A Bid for Fortune in 1895. It was followed by a sequel, Dr Nikola Returns. By the time Lang made this movie Sax Rohmer had written his first three Dr Fu Manchu novels. In 1911 Fantômas, created by by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, made his first appearance in print. Louis Feuillade’s first Fantômas movie serial was released in 1913. Lang was tapping into a major pop culture obsession of the time.

The Spiders demonstrates the extraordinary technical sophistication of the German film industry in 1919 and the 29-year-old Lang’s confidence and ambition.

For many years this film was thought to be lost but a print was found in the 1970s.

The Spiders is a rather outrageous rollicking adventure romp. Highly recommend.

The Kino Classics DVD offers a reasonable transfer given the film’s age and rarity.

It’s interesting that almost at the end of his career Lang returned to Germany and made another two-part movie, known popularly as the Indian Epic, with a somewhat similar feel to The Spiders.

Asphalt (1929)

Joe May’s German silent film Asphalt (Der Polizeiwachtmeister und die Diamantenelse), made at Ufa Studios in 1929, can be seen as both the last gasp of German Expressionism and the first step on the road to film noir.

A very serious-minded young traffic cop named Albert Holk, straight out of police college (Gustav Fröhlich), arrests a glamorous jewel thief. When she flutters her eyelashes at the jeweller he asks the police to drop the charges but Wachtmeister Holk takes his job very seriously indeed. He is determined not to fall for such cheap tricks and to bring this dangerous menace to society to justice.

The thief, Else Kramer (Betty Amann), uses all of her feminine wiles (and she knows them all) on young Holk. He resists manfully but really he never stands a chance. She persuades him to let her go back to her apartment to get her papers, and after considerable effort she seduces him.

Young Holk is devastated. He has let the side down. Worse than that, he has let his parents down. And his father is a retired policeman. He is filled with shame.

All this is bad enough, but there is worse to come. Else sends him a gift. He goes to her apartment, intending to indignantly return the gift, but he falls for those feminine wiles all over again. And now he is drawn into the noir nightmare world, a journey that will end in murder.



Born in Vienna, Joe May was not one of the big names of German silent cinema but he was prolific and was in fact one of the pioneers, beginning his directing career as early as 1911. He ended his career in the United States after fleeing Germany in the wake of the Nazi takeover. His US movies were all B-movies - he was never able to achieve the same level of success there that he’d enjoyed in Germany.

Metropolis star Gustav Fröhlich makes Holk more interesting and more sympathetic than the synopsis would suggest. He tries his hardest to resist the noir nightmare world but he’s outgunned by the beautiful and glamorous Else.



Betty Amann was an American actress (although born in Germany) who take the same road to German film that Louise Brooks had taken. I have heard it argued that Amann was actually the better actress. That is of course nonsense and she is unable to give her characterisation the depth that Brooks gave to her roles. Having said that, Amann was a fine actress and she really was exceptionally glamorous, she’s perfectly cast and she gives a fine performance. Else is not a one-dimensional femme fatale. She genuinely falls for the naïve but handsome young cop. She starts out seeing him as a ridiculous figure, a clown she can manipulate, but she ends by not only falling in love with him but by seeing him as her chance of redemption.

Albert Steinrück as Holk’s father and Else Heller as his mother give moving performances. Holk’s father has such a high sense of duty that it overrides his own humanity. Else Kramer is a bad girl but she is in some ways more sympathetic - her feelings override her own best interests. The conflict between duty and emotion is the driving force of the story.



This is certainly not full-on Expressionism, but there are subtle hints of the stye in this movie. There is for instance a staircase scene that looks not merely Expressionist but also very film noir. There is plenty of proto-noir in this movie with moody shadows and the exciting but slightly sleazy backdrop of nightlife in Weimar Republic Germany which manages to be as noir as LA in the 40s.

Joe May may not have scaled the heights that German film-makers like Fritz Lang scaled but he was more than a mere journeyman director. Asphalt is stylish and visually arresting. The obvious comparison is going to be with Pabst’s masterpiece Pandora's Box (starring the aforementioned Louise Brooks). Asphalt inhabits similar territory and like Pabst May tones the Expressionism way down, leaving it as a subtle suggestion rather than an overwhelming visual signature.



Asphalt has been released in Region 2 by Eureka in their Masters of Cinema and in Region 1 by Kino. I haven’t seen either of these DVDs so I can’t comment on them.

Asphalt is not in the same league as Pandora's Box or Fritz Lang’s M but it’s not without interest, it’s stylish and entertaining and Betty Amann’s performance is enough to make it a must-see for silent movie fans. Film noir fans will be fascinated by the early hints of that style in this movie. Recommended.

The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933)

In 1922 with Dr Mabuse the Gambler Fritz Lang created the first great cinematic diabolical criminal mastermind. In 1933 he was persuaded,despite some initial hesitations, to make a sequel. It was to be his last German movie for almost three decades.

Dr Mabuse’s earlier criminal career had ended in madness. As the second film opens he remains a near-catatonic madman in a lunatic asylum. But has the world really heard the last of Dr Mabuse?

Kriminalkomissar Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) is pursuing the mysterious case of ex-police detective Hofmeister. Hofmeister had ben thrown off the police force in disgrace but had hoped to redeem himself by carrying out his own investigations into a counterfeiting racket. Hofmeister is now a babbling lunatic. The threads of this case lead Lohmann to an insane asylum operated by Professor Baum. Baum’s star patient is none other than Dr Mabuse, and his interest in this very special patient verges on the obsessive. In Baum’s eyes Mabuse was both genius and madman. Baum has been collecting the Mabuse’s notes, which at first seem to be nonsensical but which after a time start to assume a sinister significance.

Also drawn into this web is a man named Kent, an ex-convict who works for a vast criminal organisation. Kent is a decent man who has become involved in crime through a series of misadventures and misfortunes but he has no taste for the extreme methods used by this crime syndicate. And he has fallen in love with Lili, a woman whose belief in his fundamental goodness is unshakeable.

Of course none of this can have anything to do with Dr Mabuse. He is incurably insane and hasn’t spoken for years. And yet the criminal activities convulsing the city seem to have the unmistakable Mabuse stamp, being concerned more with spreading fear and confusion than with actual profit. And these activities are on a grandiose scale such as could only be conceived of by a madman whose mind works on such epic scales.

This is the paranoid world of Fritz Lang, a world of people trapped in vast webs of deceit and manipulation from which escape seems impossible. They know they are trapped but they don’t even understand how or by whom, much less have any idea how to extricate themselves.

Lang pulls off a number of spectacular visual set-pieces. The room in which the young lovers are trapped, the sabotage of the chemical factory, the criminal mastermind seen only as a shadow behind a curtain, all these scenes are not merely impressive but they act to increase the feelings of entrapment and of a world in which corruption and violence flourish (very similar to the atmosphere of his first talkie M in 1931). There’s also a superb night-time car chase. Lang uses lots of high-angle shots which again have the effect of making the characters seem somehow puny and insignificant, up against forces beyond their control.

Lang adapted very quickly to sound and uses it in striking ways to add to the overwhelming sense of imprisonment. The opening sequence is a tour-de-force of sound effects, with an incessant hammering sound that makes both the unfortunate Hofmeister and the audience feel that the world is inexorably closing in on them.

The acting is impressive and restrained, which is appropriate given the fact that most of the characters are mere playthings of fate. Rudolf Klein-Rogge once again plays Mabuse. Otto Wernicke is particularly memorable as the determined Kriminalkomissar Lohmann, a character who in some ways anticipated Glenn Ford’s tenacious and obsessive honest cop in Lang’s 1953 the Big Heat.

Lang later claimed the movie was a kind of allegory of the methods used by the Nazis but Lang was always conscious in interviews of the necessity to further the Lang legend and his public statements were often spectacularly unreliable. It seem more likely that the film was intended as a criticism of political extremism in general, of both the left and the right, and of the use of violence and terror as means of gaining political power. Personally I think this makes the movie’s achievement more impressive. Like most of Lang’s great movies it deals with universal themes and the themes of this particular film have remained frighteningly relevant right down to our own day.

The Eureka UK all-region DVD release is a restored print that allows us to appreciate the visual brilliance of Lang’s German films. Both the movie and the DVD release are highly recommended. A must-see for anyone who is even vaguely serious about movies.