The Spiders - Episode 2: The Diamond Ship

As with many serials, the end may just be the beginning. See part two "The Diamond Ship".

In part, two Kay Hoog who previously captured the secret of the Diamond Ship from the mysterious cabal "The spiders" has sworn revenge on Lio Sha for transgressions made in part one.

While the Spiders seek a diamond-shaped while the head of Buddha for their nefarious purposes. Kay seeks to spoil their plot. Again we get to go to exotic places leading to the Falkland Islands. Fortunately this time enough loose ends are sufficiently wrapped up so we do not have to wait for part three (which will never come.)

This episode is a worthy continuation in the series. As in the first part there is a lot of action. The search is on for the Buddha shaped diamond. This is the sort of film that inspired Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The first Spiders movie was a relatively small and focused adventure. The second is bigger and far less focused, moving from one to location to the next in an amorphous mystery that doesn't so much escalate with increasing stakes but just kind of lurches from one thing to the next. There had been planned two more episodes in the Spiders saga, but they got canceled. I can't find reasoning for it, but I would imagine it to be simply financial. They didn't make the kind of money needed to recoup investments, and Fritz Lang went off to make smaller dramas for a couple of years. I suppose the German appetite for adventure stories wasn't that deep at the time.

Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt) is out for vengeance against the criminal enterprise The Spiders and, in particular, one of their members Lio Sha (Ressel Orla) after Sha killed Hay's love at the end of the previous episode. The Spiders are on the move, though. They are determined to find a special diamond, formed in a way that resembles Buddha that, if used correctly, will give them control of all of Asia. There's an unexplored set of ideas about imperialism here with the Spiders trying to overturn one imperialistic regime to replace their own while Kay does not seem to concern himself too much with the question at all. It's an interesting beginning of subtext that the movie is completely unconcerned with mining.

Anyway, Kay has to pursue the Spiders into an underground Chinatown in San Francisco (kind of a proto-Big Trouble in Little China) where he gets clues and stows aboard a Spider ship (the eponymous diamond ship) that is headed towards South America. They receive a telegraph from Fourfinger John (Edgar Pauly) that John Terry (Rudolf Lettinger) has the diamond in his possession due to his relationship with the man who discovered it hundreds of years before. Kay finds this information out by sneaking out of a shipping box at night, complete with silly looking ninja-like outfit, and reads the telegraph message. In England, the Spiders kidnap Terry's daughter Ellen (Thea Zander) as leverage to get Terry to reveal to them the location of the diamond. Kay escapes the ship, connects with Terry, and together they discover that it is probably hidden in a secret treasure cave on the Falkland Islands. So...the chase moves again to the Falklands for the final confrontation.

I have nothing against globe trotting adventures, but the structure has to be there to support the move from one place to the next. It isn't helped by the fact that most of what we see are simply sets that could be pretty much anywhere. We're not even getting an exciting moment on Big Ben or something. It's just a room in England. The mystery itself feels really amorphous, like the people involved are bumbling from one thing to the next, spinning their wheels and getting no closer for most of the film. The trip down to Chinatown is a great example. It gets Kay on the boat, but we get no advancement in the mystery. That advancement, the notice that Terry may know where the treasure is, comes while they're going towards South America, is surprisingly thin. It doesn't feel like an advancement, and Terry not knowing is unsatisfying as well. The advancements we do get are so small that it feels more like the movie is just elongating the action to fill out the runtime.

That being said, it's not a complete slog. At only 104 minutes, all this action does keep the thing moving. The brisk pace doesn't let the film get too bogged down in the meaningless detail of the mystery. The few bits of action are clearly filmed, and the production design is nice, though not as fun or impressive as the Incan city set in the first film or the Japanese city in Harakiri.

This isn't exactly the worst film I've ever seen, but it is a surprisingly ineffective mystery and thriller. It feels like a young filmmaker getting ambitious and working too quickly to iron out important narrative details.

This "Spiders" sequel, "The Diamond Ship", is just as ridiculous and sensational as the series's first part. The rich adventurer continues in his pursuit of the criminal gang, the Spiders, who are after a diamond that's linked with Asian independence, leading the protagonist into a world of espionage, kidnapping and to a subterranean Chinatown.

Fritz Lang continues to copy other filmmakers, including Louis Feuillade. An early scene in this film is, I think, evident of Fritz Lang's poor direction at this early point in his career: the overhead shot of a bank robbery, with no ceiling, was done better by Maurice Tourneur in "Alias Jimmy Valentine" (1915). With Tourneur, it was an innovative, well-photographed scene, but with Lang, it's derivative and poorly done. It's the same with the rest of this two-part series; there's some technical skill, but it's all inferior duplication of other films and serials. Lang would become a great director, but that didn't begin here. And, German silent cinema would be one of the greatest periods in film history, but "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920) is still the beginning of that. "The Spiders" is merely what everyone else had already been doing... often better.

The second of two (out of a planned four) adventure films made by Fritz Lang in 1919 to feature dashing adventurer Kay Hoog (Carl de Vogt) unfortunately lacks the energy and enthusiasm of its predecessor. It tells a similar tale - this time, Hoog seeks a missing diamond that is coveted by the shady Die Spinnen organisation due to its mystical powers - but the plot is muddled and of little interest. A few moments stand out - a consultation with an aged Yogi is particularly memorable - but the pacing is far too sluggish, and even de Vogt looks bored.