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| Images courtesy of Eureka Entertainment |
The character of Dr. Mabuse first originated in novelist
Norbert Jacques’ 1921 book Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler as a master of
disguise and telepathic hypnosis who seeks to sow as much chaos and disorder
into then-contemporary Germany.
Utilizing everything from the television screen to the phonograph,
Mabuse as a supervillain secretly runs a criminal empire of many figures
whether it be blackmail or telepathic manipulation or cocaine, although rarely
ever does the supervillain commit his crimes in person. Much like a proto-Hannibal Lecter or the
Joker, Mabuse is able to orchestrate and execute these crimes from behind
closed doors sometimes without lifting a finger. Though originally created to imitate Fantomas
or Svengali or even Dr. Fu Manchu, the character of Mabuse nevertheless became
an enormous literary success and paved the way for what would become two
profound pieces of German expressionist horror with Fritz Lang’s 1922 silent
adaptation of Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler and his banned-by-the-Nazis 1933
sound sequel The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.
Towering in size and scope with still stirring technical
proficiency and innovation including but not limited to striking superimpositions,
dynamic cinematography, appropriately grotesque performances and makeup effects
and a tendency towards violence, the first two Mabuse film are indelible masterworks
of pure cinema. However following the
proliferation of the Nazi party with Joseph Goebbels himself putting the film
under lock and key and his wife-collaborator Thea von Harbou joining the Nazis,
Lang fled to the United States where he maintained a tenure in American film as
a director of film noirs. But around the
late 1950s following the end of the Second World War and occupation as well as
the division of Germany into East and West, Lang returned to West Germany to
direct roughly three more features for producer Artur Brauner which were The
Tiger of Eschnapur, The Indian Tomb and what ultimately became his
final film The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse in 1960s for the CCC Filmkunst
company.
While the Lang film proved to be something of a
disappointment compared to the first two Lang-Mabuse features stylistically and
conceptually, it nevertheless ushered in the character into the Cold War era
with elements of the Edgar Wallace film series, the spy thriller and Orwellian
overtones of overarching surveillance.
Deviating from the original Norbert Jacques text, instead using Jean
Forge’s Esperanto novel Mr. Tot Buys a Thousand Eyes as the basis with
screenwriting by Lang and Henz Oskar Wuttig, the 1960 crime thriller co-produced
by France, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse marked a near-forty year gap
between the last Mabuse film and ultimately spawned after Lang’s film an entire
series of sequels produced by CCC Filmkunst.
Brought together in one set for the first time by Eureka Entertainment
following their previous releases of Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler and The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse, the aptly named Mabuse Lives! blu-ray box
consists of six feature films all restored in 2K featuring a sixty-page booklet
and plentiful extras across all of the movies.
While none of the films here come close to the first two Lang features
in the Mabuse saga, Mabuse Lives nevertheless proved to be a lot of Cold
War era crime thriller entertainment that further elevated the iconic timeless
supervillain into the stratosphere.
In the first film in the set, Lang’s aforementioned final
bow out of the limelight The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, the character originally
played with mad gusto by Metropolis actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge now
reemerges recast with Wolfgang Preiss.
When a news reporter is killed while driving his car to work, the
Inspector Kras (notable character actor Gert Fröbe) receives a call from his
clairvoyant informant that he saw a vision of the crime but not the
culprit. Meanwhile a well-to-do American
industrialist named Henry Travers (Peter van Eyck) checks into a hotel formerly
designed by the Nazis with cameras to spy on every patron’s room, crossing
paths with Marian Menil (Dawn Addams) who is evading her club-footed hubby. Amid these guests including a crooked
insurance salesman, we will see them gradually come together in an effort to
solve the mystery of Dr. Mabuse’s mysterious reemergence.
Featuring a jazzy score co-written by Bert Grund and Werner
Muller with classy if not formalist cinematography by Karl Lob, the final film
of Fritz Lang and first in a new series of films centered around the mystical
Dr. Mabuse couldn’t be more different or separated from the two films paving
the way for it if it tried. With a bit
of a mod-sixties Cold War era West German vibe, elements of the spy subgenre
and the crime thriller, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse jettisons the uncanny
German expressionist brushstrokes of the first two in favor of a more
utilitarian pulpiness that would carry over across all five of the subsequent
sequels. Despite changing directors
roughly four times, Lang’s style establishes how the sequels would look and
sound with recurring character actors across the films and a vague sense of the
B-movie serial permeating all of them.
Whereas Lang’s trilogy began and ended across the span of
nearly forty years, producer Artur Brauner and CCC Filmkunst saw fit to
generate two films between 1961 and 1962 by Harald Reinl, first with The
Return of Dr. Mabuse which saw the character use brainwashed cellmates to
commit numerous crimes while evading German police as well as the FBI and
targeting a nuclear power plant while second with The Invisible Dr. Mabuse which,
you guessed it, is a riff on The Invisible Man. Though absurdist and effects heavy involving
Dr. Mabuse at a stage theater play watching from the balcony as binoculars
levitate by themselves, the speed with which Artur Brauner kept cranking out
more Mabuse iterations is kind of remarkable.
Not even months later, he hired Werner Klinger to direct a stripped
down, cheaper yet clearly faithful remake of Lang’s own 1933 masterwork The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse. The only
film in the CCC series to remake a preexisting chapter, it is comparatively the
weakest picture in the set albeit still entertaining with its own movement of
the events from post-WWI Germany to the 1960s.
The series picks up in a big way, however, with Paul May’s Scotland
Yard Hunts Dr. Mabuse which was in contrast to the other Mabuse films based
instead on a story by Bryan Edgar Wallace whose father Edgar’s novels became
immensely popular in 1960s Germany made into commercially successful films
which also influenced the Dr. Mabuse sequels.
In Scotland Yard Hunts Dr. Mabuse, the action has been relocated
to England with Thousand Eyes actor Peter van Eyck returning albeit in a
different role as Major Bill Tern. In
it, Mabuse’s team is armed with a handful of cameras which can control the
minds of any it takes a photograph of.
Pointing to a kidnapping plot involving the Queen and the hypnosis of
numerous people including Klaus Kinski as Inspector Joe Wright.
Last but not least in the series is Argentinian filmmaker
Hugo Fregonese’s psychedelic and vaguely hyperkinetic The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse
which is the most overtly science-fiction oriented of the series even after
Mabuse was able to make himself invisible.
Released in 1964 and picking back up in Britian ala Scotland Yard
with Peter van Eyck back again, this time as Major Bob Anders, the film follows
the Secret Service agent into a remote island commandeered by Professor Larsen
(O.E. Hasse). The Professor seems to
have invented some sort of death ray that pivots off of the moon to unleash
untold destructive forces upon the face of the Earth, an invention that will
invariably spark the interest of Dr. Mabuse who has his own plans for world
domination. As Major Anders leads a team
of militia and police against Larsen and Mabuse, the fate of the world comes
closer to hanging by a thread than it does in this final Mabuse/CCC offering.
Eureka Entertainment’s deluxe boxed set of films wouldn’t be
complete without the numerous extras included such as interviews with Alice Brauner
now managing director of CCC Film, video essays by Tim Lucas, David Cairns and
Fiona Watson, alternate versions of the first film’s ending and a longer
Italian cut of the last film but most importantly it has a 2002 interview with
the new face of Mabuse actor Wolfgang Preiss.
While the box plainly doesn’t hold a candle to the first two Fritz Lang
offerings, Eureka Entertainment’s efforts to curate and publish these films in
the US for the first time is a noble, valiant effort. Filmgoers keen on the screen-text crossovers
that were happening in Germany at the time, including Lang’s own M and The
Testament of Dr. Mabuse being interconnected, will delight in these Cold
War era B-movie thrillers springboarding from one of cinema and literature’s
most iconic supervillains. The 2K
digital restorations are beautiful and the package design itself is handsome
and one collectors will want to proudly display on their media shelves.
--Andrew Kotwicki
