The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, May 18-24
Destiny (1921)
Directed by Fritz Lang
Lang’s earliest extant great film unfolds primarily in a bucolic small town where two traveling young lovers (played by the urgently expressive Lil Dagover and the more receding Walter Janssen) have stopped to spend the night at an inn. Their idyll is disrupted by Death (Bernhard Goetze), a solemnly graven-faced being wearily worn down from his work, who seizes the man to transport to the underworld. The dark figure is moved by the woman’s pleas to keep her beloved, however, and so offers her three chances to exchange his life for another—three chances represented by three candles and three stories involving Destiny’s main actors that are told across three widely different historical eras. When Destiny was first released, the film was richly color-tinted, but the tinted prints of good viewing quality were eventually lost, leaving only black-and-white screening copies to circulate. This new digital restoration of Destiny (which contains an appropriately moody, unobtrusive new score composed by German recording artist Cornelius Schwehr) returns the film’s cool greens, pensive blues, and fiery reds, thus aiding the emotional immediacy of a story whose characters all merit sympathy. The restoration work honors the intentions of a tale that itself treats on the theme of resurrection, one in which Death finds ways to bring lovers together across time and, by doing so, gives them second life. Aaron Cutler (May 20-26, showtimes daily, at Film Forum)