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Bargaining with Death for the return to life of her dead husband, a young woman is sent back into three periods of history where she must enact a woman in similar circumstances. If she can save her lover she has won her bargain. Lang’s first exploration of the nature of Fate, which emerged as a major theme in his work, here takes the guise of Death. For Lang, Fate is a mixture of the repressive conditions of modern society and the nature of the Human Condition itself. Fate is expressed visually as much as by plot: the characters are frequently dwarfed and overshadowed by the huge expressively lit sets, imprisoned by and reduced to geometrical elements of the décor. Thus Lang’s mise-en-scene renders perfectly the feeling of domination which this Fate governed Universe evokes in Man
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