Tigress of Bengal is an incoherent amalgam of portions of [The Tiger of Eschnapur and The Indian Tomb], weighed down by childish American dialogue and out-of-synch dubbing. Yet enough remains to prove their unmistakable authorship. To find their origins we have to go back over forty years, to a scenario written by Lang and Thea von Harbou for the silent version directed by Joe May, for whom Lang was then working. And one has only to look at Lang's own Die Spinnen of 1919 (and, to a lesser extent, Destiny and Kriemhild's Revenge) to find the connection. Lang has always had an affection for schoolboy hokum, the super serial of adventure and intrigue set in some never-never land of the imagination, and the two Indian films belong defiantly to this enjoyable if outdated tradition.

The pleasure to be derived from the films does not lie in the story—they...