Destiny Express

Hailed by Thomas Pynchon as ';daringly imagined and darkly romantica moral thriller,' Destiny Express captures both the glamour and the terror of an era, dramatizing the perilous moment when art, politics, and destiny converged on the tracks out of Berlin.Berlin, the last day of February, 1933. The Reichstag lies in smoldering ruins, a new world about to spring from its ashes. And now for German filmmakers the choices are stark: stay and collaborate with a government that believes in cinema's power to shape reality, or leave everything behind. Destiny Express is the story of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, husband and wife, director and screenwritertogether, they made some of the greatest films of all time: M, Metropolis, Doctor Mabuse. As each day is torn from the calendar they watch as one by one Bertolt Brecht, Max Ophuls, Billy Wilder, take the next train out. Destiny Express follows Lang, von Harbou, and a host of real and fictional othersnovelist-turned-minister-of-culture Joseph Goebbels, American caf Surrealist Sam Harrison, Mercedes racing champ Otto Merz, film star Rudolf Klein-Rogge, a pair of not-so-secret policeas their paths converge, intertwine, and separate across the grid of Berlin, from the artificial daylight of the UFA soundstage to the artificial night of Berlin's most exclusive and decadent nightclubs. Harsh lights, long shadows: the perfect setting for a deeply researched, deftly imagined tale, as one character puts it, of "e;crime, gambling, cocaine, jazz, stock exchange maneuvers, smuggling, hypnosis, counterfeiting, violence, Expressionism."e; Destiny Express is the story of a marriage at the end of its passion, at the edge of historyall at the end of an era when film was to mean more than it ever would again.