The second part of Lang's Indian epic, picks up where part one left off with the lovers, exotic palace dancer Seetha and German architect Harold Berger attempting to escape Prince Chandra the ruler of Eschnapur. As you can see from this one sentence plot description we are not exactly in the world of documentary realism here.
As in part one The Tiger of Eschanpur, Lang is playing this extremely old fashioned adventure story absolutely straight. Lang was working with better budgeted films than he had been given in quite a while. The result was this two part film that deliberately courted the story lines and situations of the old fashioned adventure epic.
A major highlight of this film is the bizarre cobra dance with a nearly nude Debra Paget dancing in an underground Indian temple which features a gigantic statue of a woman with enormous breasts. We are now in a strange fantasy film world which is about as fantastic as Lang's Nibelungen Saga.
Fritz Lang's Indian films are probably just to "out of it" and plain weird to appeal to a modern audience used to a Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson spectacle. However these Indian films are interesting pieces of narrative by a major artist who probably knew more about the art of storytelling then those three could ever begin to understand.
102 minutes. Screenplay by Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou and Werner Jörg Lüddecke.
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