fiction.wikisort.org - Movie

The Tiger of Eschnapur, or in original German, Der Tiger von Eschnapur, is a 1959 West German-French-Italian adventure film directed by Fritz Lang.[1] It is the first of two films comprising what has come to be known as Fritz Lang's Indian Epic; the other is The Indian Tomb (Das Indische Grabmal). Fritz Lang returned to Germany to direct these films, which together tell the story of a German architect, the Indian maharaja for whom he is supposed to build schools and hospitals, and the Eurasian dancer who comes between them.

The Tiger of Eschnapur
German theatrical release poster
Directed by	Fritz Lang
Screenplay by	Fritz Lang Werner Jörg Lüddecke Thea von Harbou
Based on	Das indische Grabmal by Thea von Harbou
Produced by	Artur Brauner
Starring	Debra Paget Paul Hubschmid Walter Reyer
Cinematography	Richard Angst
Edited by	Walter Wischniewsky
Music by	Michel Michelet
Distributed by	Fantoma Omnia-Film Polyband GmbH
Release date	22 January 1959 (1959-01-22)
Running time	101 minutes
Countries	West Germany France Italy[1][2][3]
Language	German

Prior works

Lang's Indian epic is based on work he did forty years earlier on a silent version of Das Indische Grabmal. He and Thea von Harbou co-wrote the screenplay, basing it on von Harbou's novel of the same name. Lang was set to direct, but that job was taken from him and given to Joe May. Lang did not control the final form of that earlier version which was a commercial and critical failure at the time, although its reputation has grown in recent years.

Released in 1921, the original version of Das Indische Grabmal had a running time of 31⁄2 hours and was released in two parts. For the remake, Lang also divided the story into two parts that each run about 100 minutes, a length modern audiences can more easily accept.^{[citation needed]}

Plot

Architect Harold Berger arrives in India and travels to the kingdom ruled by Maharajah Chandra, for whom he will be building schools and hospitals. En route to the Maharajah's palace, Berger travels with a temple dancer named Seetha, who has also been invited to the palace. En route, he saves her life when her caravan is attacked by a man-eating tiger.

Seetha, whose father was European, has inadvertently caused the Maharajah to become infatuated while he watched her dancing at a religious ceremony. She and the architect, however, have secretly begun to fall in love. This leads to tension between Chandra and Berger, further exacerbated by scheming courtiers, including the Maharaja's older brother. They believe that Chandra's potential marriage to the dancer could become a pretext for toppling his reign.

Seetha and Berger escape together into the desert, just before Berger's sister and her husband, an architect who works with Berger, arrive in Eschnapur. Chandra informs them that he now wants a tomb to be built before any further work can begin on the previously commissioned schools and hosptals. After discovering that Berger and Seetha have escaped, Chandra issues a command for Berger to be killed, and Seetha returned alive for buriel in the tomb after its completion. The film ends with the couple stranded in the desert after their horses expire, just as a sandstorm begins.

(The story continues in the sequel film, The Indian Tomb)

Cast

Production

The film was shot on location in India with a predominantly German cast.[4] Lang was able to get permission from the Maharana of Udaipur to shoot at many locations that were normally barred to Western film crews. One of these was the floating Lake Palace seen much later in Octopussy.[5]

Interiors were shot at the Spandau Studios in Berlin with sets designed by the art directors Helmut Nentwig and Willy Schatz.^{[citation needed]}

Releases

The two films were edited down into one 95-minute feature courtesy of American International Pictures and released in the US in 1959 as Journey to the Lost City—with Seetha's dance scenes heavily trimmed, courtesy of the Hays Office. The negatives of Fritz Lang's original films were thought to be lost, but a set was rediscovered. Fantoma Films restored them in the DVD format, producing one disc for each film. The discs contain both German and English dialogue tracks, plus other extras. They were released by Image Entertainment in 2001.^{[citation needed]}

Trivia

• Another film titled Der Tiger von Eschnapur was released in Germany in 1938. It too was based on Thea von Harbou's novel Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb). The film was directed by Richard Eichberg and written by him along with Hans Klaehr and Arthur Pohl.

References

External links

• The Tiger of Eschnapur at IMDb
• The Tiger of Eschnapur at AllMovie
• "Come On, Baby, Be My Tiger" - article about the several versions of the film
• DVD Savant
• Artur-Brauner-Archive at the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt (German), containing the production files for this movie

На других языках

---

- [en] The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959 film)

---

[ru] Бенгальский тигр (фильм)

«Бенгальский тигр» (нем. Der Tiger von Eschnapur) — приключенческий фильм немецкого режиссёра Фрица Ланга, снятый в 1958 году по мотивам романа Теа фон Гарбоу. Продолжение этого фильма — «Индийская гробница».

---

---