The Great Escape That Never Was : DESTINY EXPRESS <i> by Howard A. Rodman (Atheneum: $18.95; 192 pp.)</i>

In her exquisite small novel, “Light,” Eva Figes told her story through the eyes of the French Impressionist painter who was its central figure. Howard Rodman has tried something similar here: telling the story of the great film director Fritz Lang’s “escape” from Germany, as the Nazis came to power in 1933, through the eyes of Lang and his scriptwriter wife, Thea von Harbou.

It’s an intriguing idea, since Lang’s visual world was strongly defined--a jagged, powerfully geometrical place of great good and great evil, often expressing grim forebodings that Hitler’s rule was soon to render murderously concrete.

Unfortunately, it’s a very difficult world to convey in words, compared to the soft, sensuous flow of the Figes book, and Rodman brings it off only fitfully, never really making Lang’s world look like a Lang film. But this is not the only reason why the book is not very satisfying; puzzlingly, for more than half its pages, Rodman keeps the dramatic materials of the legend off-stage, and even a reader who knows the basic legend is likely to find this frustrating.

Lang assiduously propagated the story (embroidering it more as the years passed, his biographer Lotte Eisner wrote) that the very day Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s newly installed and demonic minster of propaganda, asked him to head the Nazi film industry, the half-Jewish Lang got on the train and escaped to Paris--not even waiting a day to get his money out of the bank, the banks having closed when he left Goebbels’ office. Instead of presiding over the Nazi “Potemkins” and “Ninotchkas” that Goebbels offered him, Lang’s later career took him to Hollywood, while Von Harbou remained in Berlin, working under the Nazis.

Rodman holds this back, the heart of his tale, until late in the book, preceding it with an oblique and tedious account of the deteriorated relationship between Lang and his collaborator-wife, who is having an affair with a mysterious American. Tiny clues to the surrounding political developments in Berlin pop up here and there, but unless you already care about Lang and know something about the unhappy history of the times, you probably won’t care too much about his emotional frame of mind concerning Von Harbou.

Rodman does a decent job of conveying how Lang might have seen his domestic world (he’s good at Lang’s perceptions of light and shadows, for instance), but he doesn’t make it matter much to us. Lang and Von Harbou, in their own stories, were hardly so reticent; they slapped the premises of their films right in the viewer’s face, and if Rodman had tried to follow their aesthetic in the framing of his story as well as in details of its narration, he might have written a much more compelling book.

There also is a little problem about Rodman’s use of Lang’s legend: The legend recently has been proven false. As Swedish historian Gosta Werner has found (an article about all this will appear in the spring issue of Film Quarterly), Lang’s passport has turned up in the German archives. It shows that Lang in fact went in and out of Germany several times after his probable interview with Goebbels (which is not mentioned in the evil doctor’s usually meticulous diary); that he didn’t really leave Berlin for good until many months later; that he did take a sizeable sum of money with him on at least one occasion.

Nor was Lang so immediately allergic to the Nazis as he later implied: He was one of the four major founders of the NTBO, set up to provide guidance to the film makers of the new Reich a few days before he probably saw Goebbels.

All this notwithstanding, Lang was one of the great film makers of all time, and all Lang fans will find a certain fascination in Rodman’s effort to dramatize the legend--a part of Lang’s creative life even if not of his real life.