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At the end of his career, Fritz Lang returned to Germany and a producer who gave him a big budget to remake a silent classic in color, with an international cast and locations in remote India, including a palace never seen in a movie before. The two-movie, 200-minute epic was chopped in half for America and dubbed in English. Seen in its full Eastmancolor glory, The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb form an old-fashioned storybook tale, with its special charm lying in our knowledge of Fritz Lang’s fixation on fatalism and intricate patterns of betrayal and intrigue. Plus the films contain the erotic highlight of the decade, the spectacle of star Debra Paget’s scorching ‘temple dances’ before an all-male audience of admirers.

Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic

The Tiger of Eschnapur

and The Indian Tomb

Blu-ray

Film Movement Classics

1959 / Color / 1:33 flat full frame / 203 min. / Street...

Often relegated to a cursory mention as one of the great filmmaker’s late-career trifles, Fritz Lang’s “Indian Epic”—comprising The Tiger of Eschnapur (Der Tiger von Eschnapur) and The Indian Tomb (Das Indische Grabmal), both from 1959—is more like a charming throwback to his earliest work than it is an indication of any waning productivity. Its supporting roots stretch from the early 1920s, when Lang and his soon-to-be-wife Thea von Harbou began drafting an adaptation of her 1918 novel, “The Indian Tomb.” Owing in part to Lang’s relative inexperience, though, the project was turned over to Joe May, who directed the subsequent two-part feature in 1921, which would itself be remade by Richard Eichberg in 1938. Lang bristled at the creative theft (as he saw it anyway) and went packing to Ufa, promptly flourishing as one of the preeminent filmmakers in the world. Later, after more than two decades in Hollywood,...

The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present this two-part adventure epic directed by the legendary Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M, etc) in the UK for the first time on home video. Widely regarded as one of the most beautiful colour films in the history of cinema, Der Tiger von Eschnapur / Das indische Grabmal (Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic) is released on DVD on 18 April 2011.

See synopsis and disc details below:

Synopsis:

Fritz Lang returned to Germany on the eve of the 1960s to direct this enchanted penultimate work, a redraft of the diptych form pioneered in such silent Lang classics as Die Spinnen; Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.; and Die Nibelungen. Although no encapsulating title was lent at the time of release to what is, effectively, a single 3-hour-plus film split in two, the work that has come to be referred to in modern times as “the Indian epic” (consisting...