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Erect the cathedral, watch it burn. The shift to Kriemhild (Margarete Schön) is swift and absolute, Fritz Lang keys his mise en scène to the widowed princess and covers the country with mournful snow. (Later, as her wrath forges ahead, the landscape melts into a jagged desert.) Wearing her sorrow like a lustrous cape, the exiled maiden turns vengeful concubine and avails herself of Attila's (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) hordes—to slay Hagen Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) is the all-consuming goal, sworn "not on the cross but on the sharp edge of the sword." The tale builds to an apocalypse at once familial and national, codes of honor going up in flames while a devastated earth drinks up the spilled viscera. Not just a sequel, a chain of contrasting rhythms and patterns: When the placid Rapunzel of the first part hardens into a rabid Judith, the poem's cantos become shrieks. King Gunther (Theodor Loos) and the Burgundian warriors arrive at Attila's banquet, and their stately geometry is set against the pagan vitality of the subterranean barbarians as the magnificently sustained chaos erupts. In Lang's frigid-blazing view, Teutonic pride is but another emotion deformed by obsession, the knightly gesture that inevitably ends as a maniacal cackle. The conqueror's boisterous joy for his newborn son is no match for his wife's morbid exaltation as the pieces of her incendiary retribution fall in place. ("Never was my heart more filled with love," trembles Kriemhild before the gigantic pyre.) A work of bottomless intensity and influence—the nobility of Alexander Nevsky and the rot of Ivan the Terrible, Visconti's Night of the Long Knives (The Damned) and Boorman's splattered armors (Excalibur) flow from here. Three decades later Lang reincarnates his medieval heroine as an American moll with a half-burned face, such is the continuum of humanity's blood fables. Cinematography by Carl Hoffmann and Günther Rittau. With Gertrud Arnold, Hans Carl Mueller, Bernhard Goetzke, Erwin Biswanger, Hardy von Francois, Rudolf Rittner, and Georg John. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |