Death (Bernhard Goetzke) steals a young woman's lover, taking him to his fortress. She can bargain for his return-but only if she can preserve three lives chosen at random through history: one is in the Mideast, one in a Renaissance Venice of processionals and poisoned daggers, the last (and most facetious) episode taking place at the court of the Emperor of China. Of the Chinese segment, historian Siegfried Kracauer argued that its "magic steed, its Lilliputian army, and its (jerkily) flying carpet inspired Douglas Fairbanks to make his The Thief of Bagdad." Lil Dagover is still fresh to modern audiences as the striving girl who finds that neither murder nor sorcery can stay Death's course. Goetzke's surprising intensity creates a backhanded sympathy for the sorrowing Reaper, "weary from seeing the suffering of man." This early Lang classic is a Gothic version of Griffith's Intolerance in which death, not mercy, rules the world.