Fritz on Fridays: The Spiders — The Golden Sea
I try not to interpret Lang, or all Austrian and / or German cinema for that matter, through the tragedy of the Shoah and fascism more broadly, but The Golden Sea makes that hard through the confession of the Incan leader, who offers “a sacrifice to the sun that rises and promises to make our people
On the first Friday of every month, this column by critic Joshua Polanski will feature a short review or essay on a film directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976), the great Austrian “Master of Darkness.” Occasionally (but not too occasionally), Fritz on Fridays will also feature interviews and conversations with relevant critics, scholars and filmmakers about Lang’s influence and filmography.
1919’s The Spiders — The Golden Sea is the oldest surviving film from Fritz Lang. Halbblut and Master of Love, also both from 1919, are lost to history, as was The Golden Sea until it was rediscovered and restored in the 1970s. It is hardly believable that the first in a series of two adventure films featuring the secret society called the Spiders was lost to history for so many decades. With its adventure bravado, secret societies, action-women leads, exotic locations, hidden treasures and pagan rituals, one almost assumes while watching The Golden Sea that they are feasting on one of the most influential films in history — the childhood lifeblood of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. But no, The Golden Sea was restored in 1978 — just three years before Raiders of the Lost Ark, likely too close to have left an imprint on Spielberg (who started writing Raiders in the early 1970s).
Two more episodes were planned but never produced, and that’s likely for the best. Lang had been forced to step down from directing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to produce these two feature-length episodes. While Caligari turned out well under the care of director Robert Wiene, one wonders how else film history might have forever changed if Lang made two more of these pulp-adventure pictures. Would he have helmed the Dr. Mabuse films or Die Nibelungen? Does he find himself trapped by the timeless machinery of popular box-office genre pictures? Does Metropolis get made?
But that didn’t happen. And we do have The Spiders — The Golden Sea, a movie that, to my regret, did not feature the giant man-eating spiders I assumed but rather a crime syndicate named after the arachnid.
Continue reading at the Midwest Film Journal.