DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (1922)

In Part One of this German silent film directed by Fritz Lang, we meet Dr. Mabuse, a well-known psychoanalyst who is, in secret, a major underworld figure, as he shuffles a number of photo cards and picks one to be the disguise he's going to wear. With the help of his assistant Spoerri, whom Mabuse accuses of being “hopped up on cocaine,” he applies a white wig and beard to carry out his latest scheme: he steals a secret trade pact between Holland and Switzerland and when news of the robbery gets out, the stock market goes nuts and Mabuse is able to buy up stock cheap. He then arranges for the document to be found and sells the stock at inflated prices. Next we see Mabuse give a lecture on the success he’s had with patients by eliminating as much as possible “third-party influences” by, I assume, the use of hypnosis. We see this in action when Mabuse, in a new disguise as Hugo Balling, gains control of the rich Edgar Hull at a casino and causes him to lose a fortune to Balling. When Hull goes the next day to pay off Balling, he instead meets Cara Carozza, a chorus girl and Mabuse’s lover, who seduces Hull under Mabuse’s order. Prosecutor von Wenk suspects that Hull is the latest victim of the crime lord he calls the Great Unknown and tries to work with Hull to snare the villain. At a casino, the disguised Mabuse plays cards with the disguised Wenk, but Wenk is able to resist Mabuse's mind control, so Mabuse has Wenk gassed in a taxi, tied up, and set in the river. 

At this point, we’re roughly two hours into this 4-½ hour film. Characterization has been shallow but incidents and plot points have been coming at us fast and furious. I realized here that perhaps this movie was best experienced as if it were a serial—indeed, each half is presented in chapters just like a serial would be. In fact, it works much better as a serial, and some of the more outlandish aspects of the plot, such as Mabuse's mind control powers, are easier to accept as occurrences in a traditional serial. In other developments in Part One, we see Mabuse run a successful counterfeiting ring, employing mostly blind men; Count Told, an effete doofus, is tricked by Mabuse into cheating at cards and then exposed by Mabuse to his friends; the alluring Countess Told, who has been helping Wenk with his investigation, is captured by Mabuse. Thus ends Part One. The two-hour second part moves even more quickly, wrapping up all the plotlines, concluding with Mabuse having a breakdown into full-fledged madness and being carted away.

The character of Mabuse is well known to film buffs, mostly from Lang's sound sequel, THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE, made eleven years later, which features the raving lunatic Mabuse running a major crime ring from his cell through supernatural mind control. In popular culture, this is the more famous Mabuse incarnation, partly because he was taken to be a symbolic stand-in for Hitler who was rising to power in Germany at the time. In 1960, Lang made his third and last Mabuse film, THE THOUSAND EYES OF DR. MABUSE, and German studio CCC produced several more or less official Mabuse sequels, some of which I'll be reviewing soon. Given that I saw TESTAMENT first, I was surprised to find in this origin film a rather different Mabuse persona. Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who plays Mabuse in both movies (pictured at top right), has a tendency to go a bit melodramatic at the drop of a hat. Instead of grimly powerful, the character comes off as something of a neurotic wannabe. We have to take it for granted that Mabuse has a successful crime ring, because in most of what we see, he acts frustrated and depressed, and his mania is shown with much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair (figuratively at least). Klein-Rogge doesn't let it slip into camp and he has an expressive and threatening face. Bernhard Goetzke is both handsome and effective as the determined von Wenk, Aud Egede-Nissen is quite good as Cora who leaves the story rather sooner than I expected. The cinematography and visuals are spectacular and are always worth looking at even when the story goes a bit slack at times. The last chapter is a good playoff, with Klein-Rogge tossing off all restraint as Mabuse goes crazy. I think Mabuse's importance is in the development of the supervillain, begun perhaps with the French pulp character Fantomas and carried on through Fu Manchu, Lex Luthor, Thanos and Elon Musk. Pictured above is the dealer at the casino. [Blu-ray]