Diamantenexperte

The Spiders, Part 1: The Golden Lake (1919)
The Spiders, Part 2: The Diamond Ship (1920)
directed by Fritz Lang
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

Kay Hoog, the hero of Fritz Lang's half-finished globe-trotting adventure serial, might relish the exotic air of foreign climes (South America, Central Asia); he might be after antiquities (it's the closest I'll be getting to "crystal" and "skull" this week, that's for sure); but Lang's fascination with the urban underworld, here epitomized in the sprawling opium-flushed and lamp-lit city beneath San Francisco's "Chinese Quarter," makes his Indy more a Bond. Hoog romances the same exotic beauties with the same European pedigrees, lets them die with the usual cold-hearted disregard, and plays at making an entrance in an escalating gag-line of gadget-stuffed contraptions. The delight of a Dr. Mabuse mastermind never materializes to oppose the hawk-nosed protagonist, but his enemies, the eponymous gang, find lots of excuses to decorate corpses with a kiss of a calling card: a mounted arachnid.