Fritz Lang’s ‘Dr. Mabuse the Gambler’ Still Casts a Spell – The New York Times

The title card for Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, the German director Fritz Langs 4-hour silent so-called super-film, promises a portrait of our time. That time was 1922. Yet Langs tale of financial panic, profiteering and doomsday revelry speaks to our own.

Mabuse, which was originally shown in two parts but may be streamed as one uncut film online, was greeted by its initial German audiences as akin to a news bulletin. One Berlin paper speculated that a century hence, the movie will show people a time that they could perhaps scarcely comprehend, a time that saw the extravagance of the newly rich, the rapid gambling on the stock exchange, the clubs, the addiction to pleasure, the speculation, the vast amount of smuggling, counterfeiting and more.

Stream Dr. Mabuse the Gambler on the Criterion Channel or Kanopy.

Adapted from a popular novel by the journalist Norbert Jacques, Mabuse was a lightning bolt that crackled across the stormy sky of Weimar Germany a newly established, shellshocked democracy where two abortive revolutions followed the loss of World War I, hyperinflation was mounting and social unrest was ubiquitous.

In his later years, Lang would maintain that Mabuse originally started with a rapid-fire montage (since lost) that juxtaposed scenes from the left-wing Spartacist uprising led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the right-wing Kapp Putsch that enlisted nationalist military leaders and the assassination of the German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau. This seems unlikely since Rathenau was shot two months after Mabuse opened, but the intro was unnecessary. Mabuse merged with its moment and even prophesied what was to come.

Paranoia rules. A habitu of decadent Art Deco nightclubs, Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who would play the mad scientist Rotwang in Langs Metropolis) preys upon his wealthy victims. Not just a criminal mastermind but a psychoanalyst to boot, Mabuse has multiple ways to cloud the mind. In one newly relevant sequence, he tricks an unfortunate fall guy into self-quarantine and, having destroyed his tenuous grasp on reality, induces him to commit suicide.

Mabuse is introduced shuffling a deck of cards showing his various disguises. A more accurate translation of the title would be Dr. Mabuse the Player, for this protean villain is also an actor. Who is Behind All This? an intertitle demands. Mabuse is both ubiquitous and unknown. In his classic film history, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, the German critic Siegfried Kracauer characterized Mabuse as everywhere present but nowhere recognizable. (Or, as President Trump described Covid-19, an invisible enemy that came out of nowhere.)

The movies first chapter concerns an elaborate scheme, directed by Mabuse from his study, whereby a secret trade pact is stolen from the suitcase of a diplomat traveling by train. News of the theft, as well as the document itself, is used to crash the commodity exchange, much to Mabuses profit.

While economic chaos is inherent in Mabuses intrigues (he also operates a counterfeit money ring, staffed with blind slaves who cannot identify him), looting the rich seems to be his preferred pastime while, thanks to his hypnotic gaze and mental powers, world domination is his ultimate goal. A behind-the-scenes manipulator whose many disguises include that of a stage mesmerist, a proletarian rabble-rouser, and a Jewish peddler, he is aided by a gang of accomplices that include his cocaine-addled manservant and a saucy dancer, Cara Carozza (the Norwegian actress Aud Egede-Nissen), a star of the Folies Bergre.

These minions are in Mabuses thrall, despite the abuse they suffer at his hands. The movie is steeped in individual as well as social pathology. In addition to practicing hypnotic mind control, Mabuse inspires the sort of unquestioning, zombielike obedience (known in German as kadavergehorsam) that, a decade later, Hitler would demand from his SS and indeed all Germans. Carozza, whom Mabuse uses as a honey-trap, insists that he is the greatest man alive even after his erotic interest has been piqued by a sultry thrill-seeking countess (Gertrude Welcker).

At once wanton and repressed, the countess is a terrific character, haunting the same casinos as Mabuse but never gambling because, as she explains, she prefers to watch. Her luckless husband (Alfred Abel, who plays Joh Frederson in Metropolis) is another sort of aesthete a collector whose mansion is overstocked with mock Cubist canvases and faux African sculptures. (The cluttered parlor offers a preview of the infamous Nazi exhibition of so-called degenerate art.) The countess also casts her indolent spell on the resolute state prosecutor Norbert von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke), who doggedly pursues Mabuse until he is hypnotized by the master to drive a speeding death car.

It has been suggested that as a conjurer of mental images, Mabuse was a sort of alter ego for the domineering director. Lang spared no expense. Mabuse was shot in a studio vast enough to accommodate city streets and even neighborhoods. The swanky nightclubs are set pieces in themselves. One sequence juxtaposes a spiritualist soiree in a luxurious apartment with the opening of the Petit Casino, a cabaret promising all that pleases is allowed. Mabuse operates in both places simultaneously.

The Petit Casino features a shimmy by the notorious naked dancer Anita Berber, here wearing a tuxedo. (According to some accounts, she arrived late on the set and out-divad Lang.) The Petit Casino also provides the arena for Cara Carozza to lead on the most hapless of Mabuses victims, while he himself infiltrates the sance to hypnotize the countess into inviting him for dinner.

With a dozen chapters, Mabuse lends itself to both incremental and binge watching. Exerting its own form of mind control, it starts slowly and, abetted by an edgy modernist score, builds in intensity to a mad climax. The violent denouement anticipates by a decade the grand finale of Howard Hawkss Scarface. We have long since become inured to onscreen mayhem, but original reviews suggest that early audiences were stunned by the movies pace. Speed, horrifying speed characterizes the film, one critic wrote. Applause broke out during a scene of cars racing through the nocturnal streets of a studio-built Berlin.

Mabuse entered German popular culture and, over the course of his career, Lang was inspired to make several sequels. His second sound film, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (available to stream on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy) was in postproduction when Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Now confined to a mental hospital, the spectral Mabuse (again Klein-Rogge) uses mental telepathy and a form of radio to incite a crime wave. Lang left Nazi Germany before the film was banned. Life under a terror regime could not be rendered more impressively, Kracauer wrote. It was not shown publicly in Germany until 1951.

In the late 1950s, Lang returned to Germany to make several films including his swan song, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (rentable from Amazon Prime). No less than its predecessors, this Cold War Mabuse is a trove of prophetic paranoia with intimations of James Bond and Dr. Strangelove. It was sufficiently popular in Germany to inspire six sequels. You can imagine an internet version made today.

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Fritz Lang's 'Dr. Mabuse the Gambler' Still Casts a Spell - The New York Times