The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933)

[The following is a belated Blind Spots entry.]

Fritz Lang stood out as the first master of sound cinema by making talkies that, ironically, seemed quieter than his silent epics. Films like Die Nibelungen and Metropolis are gargantuan affairs with so many moving parts that you can practically hear gears turning, set to bombastic scores of Teutonic music. Starting with M, however, the music dies, invoked only through troubling diegetic means like the killer’s whistle in that film, or the deranged humming in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Even in Lang’s Hollywood films, where a score is imposed, there are moments of eerie silence, none more gripping than in the opening of 1941’s Man Hunt. In the place of bombastic music, that felt sound of machinery from the silent films can now be literally heard; the first scene of Testament, for example, takes place in a printing press, the roar of printers rocking the room and sounding like a train about to burst through the walls.

Capsule Reviews: While the City Sleeps, Cracking Up, The Kid, Rock of Ages

While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956)

Fritz Lang's underseen noir blends the yellowest of journalism with King Lear in a prescient, savage view of media feeding a public frenzy. A news empire is offered to three successors, with the new kingdom to be ruled by the one who can beat the cops to solving the identity of a serial killer infamous only from the organization's own salacious coverage. Lang's framing is more stripped down than some other efforts but no less immaculate: the newsroom of transparent but isolating glass and roaring presses speak to the capacity of journalism to reveal and obscure, and how a giant conglomerate can drown out the truth instead of exposing it. As much as the actual string of murders, the tension operates on simple office politics, in which the promise of a raise and a title change to move up the modern social ladder can bring out the basest, most primitive behavior. The characterization of the sexually confused killer is oh-so-standard, but Lang's ability to make high style out of even the most basic movements and mise-en-scène combines with the otherwise fantastic story for a great anti-journo noir. Grade: A-

M

[Note: This review has been cross-posted at FRED Entertainment, with a longer section on the specifics of the Criterion Blu-Ray release, its technical details and its supplements. The full review can be found here.]

It is somewhat customary in the review of a classic to point out the age of the opus in question before insisting that it still feels "as fresh as ever." It's a lazy shorthand that can be used for Wagner's Ring cycle, Joyce's Ulysses and Citizen Kane in the same breath, a write-off that attempts to reassure the reader that hallmarks of art do not have to sit in a museum, not even collecting dust because of protective cases. The statement is usually presented on its own, a QED "proof" without demonstration, allowing the writer to move on quickly out of fear that he or she has nothing to add on an already thoroughly analyzed work ("What can I say about ____ that hasn't already been said?" is also a trite shortcut that we have all used at some point no matter how much everyone hates to read the sentence). But, damn it, how can you talk about Fritz Lang's masterpiece, M, without pointing out its continued ability to grip, illuminate and provoke on the eve of its 80th anniversary?

Before one can address the subject of M, one must first consider Lang's career up to that point. The director spent his early career balancing between art projects and action-packed crowd-pleasers. Spiders, first earliest surviving film, is a two-part adventure epic that greatly influenced Spielberg's Indiana Jones series, while Destiny (or Weary Death if you prefer the more accurate translation) was a more Expressionistic story despite its own plethora of special effects (which were so impressive that Douglas Fairbanks bought U.S. distribution rights so he could bury the film until he figured out how to steal those effects for his own Thief of Baghdad). From that point, Lang began to bridge the two, making significant artistic leaps in his next epics, Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and Die Nibelungen, before starting to condense the grandeur of his work into shorter timeframes, starting with Metropolis and continuing with Spies. Spies in particular points toward M, having condensed and refined the crime thriller elements of Dr. Mabuse and lessened the Expressionistic material to a more realistic atmosphere -- even its abandonment of traditional dissolves in favor of faster cutting aided this effect.


Of course, the key difference between Spies (and Lang's next film, Woman in the Moon) and M involved the development of working sound technology and soundproof camera casings. Lang, already an operatic director, seems in retrospect the perfect filmmaker to show the capabilities of the invention.

Contrary to popular belief, M was not the first major sound film; it was not even the first noteworthy German sound film, as Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel premiered a year before. However, in the four years since talkies hit in 1927, nobody explored the boundaries of the technology like Lang. The failure of the early talkies, brilliantly lampooned in Singin' in the Rain (a film that, as a musical, of course depends on sound), was in the tendency for filmmakers to treat the technology like a fad even though nearly everyone embraced it. Apart from the odd exception of Lubitsch's early musicals or von Sternberg's Blue Angel, talkies did not approach the level of the last silents, and when the Depression hit sound became a last-ditch effort to spike theatrical attendance when it first took a dive before later spiking.

But Lang establishes sound as an integral element of the film, inseparable from the rest of it. Sound introduces the child killer who terrorizes Berlin in the form of his voice and a shadow (the most overtly Expressionistic moment of the film and a audiovisual transition point of Lang's career), allowing the murderer to remain out-of-sight and unknown to the audience; later, it is sound that destroys the man when his whistling is the clue that leads to his capture. That whistling, of "In the Hall of the Mountain King," an innately foreboding song with is accelerando structure that builds from an eerily quiet and slow low register to a cascade, as well as the schoolyard rhyme the children sing at the start (carrying, like so many rhymes, a darker undercurrent) adds tension to the film from the start. And nothing conveys tragedy like the mother of wee Elsie Beckmann, the girl the killer abducts, as she calls for her daughter in panic, her disembodied calls played over shots of horribly empty places around the city (a all-too-common device today that was introduced here) before showing the ball the girl carried rolling out from behind a bush and the balloon the killer bought her floating into telephone lines.


It is that minimalism, in fact, that makes M so unique among the director's German output. His previous features, even the smaller ones (or at least the ones that survive) had bombast, swirling in Expressionism and Expressionism-lite. An earlier crime epic like Dr. Mabuse, with its supernatural antagonist, grabbed its audience through an advancement of Feuilladian editing and through the artistic visualizations of Mabuse's mental powers. M, on the other hand, does not put anything in the frame that doesn't need to be there. Consider how much mileage Lang gets out of whistling, how he sets a horrifying leitmotif with "In the Hall of the Mountain King" and later uses it to catch out Hans Beckert, who is himself freaked out by whistling when he is discovered by a lone searcher who then alerts the rest of his posse. Images are likewise spare, from the shot of the chalk 'M' a runner draws on his hand to slap on Beckert's back to tag him as the murderer to Beckert's last attempt to hide in an attic (an oddly and disturbingly prescient image in a film that criticizes the rise of Nazism) as footsteps grow louder until the door bursts open and a flashlight illuminates the culprit. Expressionism allowed artists to paint or film images that suggested ideas, a more universally legible portrait than the works of Impressionism, which convey only the artist's sense of the subject, but M is more immediately arresting than any of Lang's more aesthetically ambitious pictures. The images and sounds are all meticulously chosen to raise tension and put forward a social commentary, which is as didactic as you might expect but layered enough to provide more than a simple anti-Nazi sentiment.

Before M, crime films defined clearly good heroes and incontrovertibly bad villains. But Lang routinely contrasts the police who crack down on Berlin to find the child killer with the criminals who are so affected by the increased pressure that they also decide to hunt for the killer to return things to normal. The clearest distinction between the two groups, brilliantly intercut between planning conferences until it becomes difficult to tell them apart, is the simple truth that the criminals are more effective; in their conference, the criminals speak of forcing landlords and homeowners to allow access to their property for searching, at which point Lang cuts back to the authorities who speak of a similar plan, only for the wizened among them to warn against such a politically disastrous act. When Beckert is eventually collared by the thieving mob, the leader, Schränker (Gustaf Gründgens in the role that led to his immense popularity in Germany during the Third Reich), downplays the killer's demands for legal representation by slyly assuring the man, "We are all law experts here."

Not only does Lang blur the line between cop and criminal, he does so under the pretense of heightened realism (he even struck a deal with police to allow real criminals to work as bit players, and when shooting wrapped they scattered before cops could re-apprehend them). M opens with a gong strike which, according to the commentary track furnished by Criterion, linked the film to the radio newscasts of the day, as if establishing the film as docudrama. At first, M plays like a well-researched police procedural, as Inspector Lohmann uncovers tiny clues and examines them thoroughly as Lang inserts shot of blown-up photographs of fingerprints and psychologically breaking down the handwriting of the killer's note to the press. At this stage, the film's direction centers on the mystery of the killer's identity and follows the legal process as if showing an audience watching a newsreel how police intend to capture the fugitive. That Hans Beckert is based on serial pedophile/killer Peter Kürten, captured only a year before the film's premiere and executed several months afterward, only adds to the ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy.


But Lang subverts his own film, itself already an innovation in terms of detail and precision, by showing Beckert's face, that of a young Peter Lorre, faced still lined with baby fat. That sudden shift establishes Lang's high-minded piloting of the events in directions the audience cannot expect. By revealing the face of the killer, Lang introduces a Brechtian element to the erstwhile realistic film that gives the audience a knowledge the other characters do not have. However, he subverts this influence, using Brecht's style often as another mode of deception, as the revelation of Beckert suggests a change to a more personal profile of the killer, which M never becomes; at times, Lang uses this more objective viewing to lure the audience astray even though it tells us the truth. Even taken on its own, the scene carries an importance, as the shot of Beckert is played with a handwriting analyst describing the killer's need for attention. As Lorre poses in the mirror, his facial contortions of menace and madness matching the descriptions of the analyst diagnosing Beckert's writing as a form of acting. As the letter was meant for the press, we can gather from Hans' sardonic attempt to look and act the way people expect him to that he not only exploits the press but is exploited by them, that the papers will turn him into that grimacing madman to sell more copies.

That mixture of social commentary with the personality of the killer has kept both the examination of Beckert as a killer and the society that hunts him fresh. Lorre gives one of the greatest breakout performance in all of cinema -- there cannot be five others to match it -- as a killer whose motivation is never explained away by a cruel childhood but who nevertheless does not fit into the role of a completely repulsive creature. In contrast to the nefarious blackguard of earlier films, Beckert does not wish to commit his crimes, and Lang often frames the killer in a way that suggests that his actions are out of his hands. He spots one girl in a mirror (portentously framed by a display of knives) and begins to whistle compulsively; he abducts her under the eye of the street rats who watch him, and Beckert must face all of his self-loathing and fear of his uncontrollable urges when the man who marks the killer makes Hans drop his knife, which the girl innocently picks up and hands back to the man who intends to use it to kill her. It's a sublimely edited and framed sequence that shows how Beckert, while unforgivable for his crimes, deserves more consideration than the mob will show him.


Naturally, compassion is the last thing on the mind of a mob. In the wake of the Beckmann murder, Berliners turn on one another, from upper-class men accusing each other and vowing to take each other to court for slander to crowds forming with alarming speed around a kind old man who tells a young girl the time, a move perceived as a lure. Made just before the Nazis took complete control of Germany and overthrew the Weimar Republic, M shows how mob rule both signified the current system, with a section of the criminal community living in open luxury from wealth gained through theft and cheating, and prefigured what Nazi policies would become when they took control, with citizens pointing fingers and naming names against those deemed suspicious. The mise-en-scène of any communal location, particularly the scenes of plotting, are swathed in cigarette smoke, choking the frame as if visualizing the noxious impotence of the authorities to right society's wrongs and their inability to stop the rising tide of fascism and the rampant corruption of a society that more or less posited the cleverer criminals as the aristocracy.

The film culminates in a farcical underground trial run by the thieves, who know full well they will kill Beckert and whose decision to hold their kangaroo court anyway demonstrates how many legitimate trials are just for show. Lang seeps this sequence in irony, with the criminals swatting down Beckert's initial protests that he cannot help himself by derisively saying how none of them can help himself when he's called to the stand. Who better to see through the tricks and excuses than the other people who use them? But Hans throws it right back in their faces, saying they simply rob and swindle and could cease their crimes by looking for work. He, on the other hand, is driven to kill; in one of the most memorable monologues in cinema, Lorre contorts in despair and loathing, passionately recounting how something inside of him takes hold and directs him against his will to murder. "Who knows what it's like inside me?" he cries, and for a moment the mob is struck dumb.

I first saw the film when I had a reactionary view of extreme crime. I scarcely wanted trials for rapists and murderers, much less compassion (even now, as an outed liberal, I will come down swiftly on rape). But M had a profound effect on me, dispensing with sob stories of childhood, an explanation that has by now become cliché in film and in reality, yet still examining how even the most abhorrent crime is not as black-and-white as we would like to believe. There is no forgiveness for murder or rape, but there must be understanding and empathy so that we might find a way to identify the mental imbalance and combat that as a method of crime prevention instead of focusing all of our outrage onto those who have already done their deeds. Lang stresses this in the final shot, after Beckert has been seized from his mock trial to attend an equally pointless one in a true court (he slyly hides how quickly the trial passes through editing, as the arm of an officer lands on Beckert's hand in the kangaroo court as the man says, "In the name of the law" before cutting to the actual courtroom as a judge continues from that phrase and prepares to declare his ruling). Just before the judges hand down the inevitable death sentence, Lang cuts to three of the mothers who lost their children to the monster, who morosely note that no punishment can bring back their children. Even as the director shows the misery and horror Beckert has caused, he also points out how capital punishment only feeds our own thirst for revenge and does not truly administer justice.


It is strange how so broadly sociopolitical a film is personal enough to speak about it from a first-person perspective. Goebbels, the Nazis' propaganda minister, adored the film upon its release, missing the anti-Nazi sentiment expressed within entirely and reading the ending as an endorsement of the death penalty. If that proves anything, it's that the Nazis perhaps weren't as calculating and intelligent as we believe, or maybe they were and could not process the emotion of the film. Goebbels himself rejected what he called "degenerate art," and while he initially made some exceptions for Expressionism he clearly cared more to see clearly defined objects and not the emotions they represented. Here, he saw a film operating in documentary-like fashion to attack the rampant crime of Weimar Germany and the necessity for harsh reprisal to force the seedier elements in line. (It was his reaction to M, in fact, that led Goebbels to seek out Lang to work for the Third Reich, leading to that infamous meeting between the two that has been greatly exaggerated, if it ever took place at all. Goebbels would, however, ban the film after Lang made an unmistakably anti-Nazi feature with The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, which used literal excerpts of Nazi doctrine, and then fled the country.)

For me, however, M offers not only, within the context of film history, the chance to see the language of fully synchronous sound being developed for the medium for the first time but, in terms of its sheer impact as a movie to be watched, an emotionally devastating statement by a director who was about to quit his country in complete disgust and fear. Thus, M is unmistakably didactic, but its messages are interlocked with its emotional and aesthetic directness. Perhaps the greatest illustration of this comes with the final lines, as a grieving mother makes the most obvious social statement when she proclaims, "You must look after the children. All of you." Clearly a message, the moment nevertheless retains a power when one considers that, at that very moment, the Hitler Youth's membership was growing and would soon become a social mandate for the children of Germany and Austria. These first-wave additions to the Hitler Youth would hit recruiting age by the time the war erupted, ensuring that they would be sufficiently brainwashed just in time for the Third Reich to call upon their loyalty. Lang certainly could not have known how deeply the Nazis would take root and pervert the nation -- much of M's incisiveness is applicable in retrospect -- but that ending runs deeper than a mere Nazi protest.

When different versions appeared in international releases, for example, this ending was typically cut in favor of a happier shot of children frolicking once more, now safe after (we assume) the state put Beckert to death. This is, of course, entirely antithetical to the proper ending, which calls for constant vigilance, not only to physically protect children but to prevent poisonous social ideas from rotting their minds. It's a far more contemplative ending that calls for intelligence and skepticism, and the fact that other countries would remove this out of discomfort of its promotion of questioning authority makes Goebbels' blind reading all the more hilarious. (That the last line, "All of you," was originally "You too" before the final word got lost in irreparable print damage only further emphasizes the importance of the task Lang assigns to parents.) The true ending makes everyone culpable, both for cleaning up crime and raising a more vigilant and noble generation to replace us, all the while balancing the emotion of the scene on its own terms.

And now, I find myself back at the start, doing everything just short of begging to insist one last time that M will grab and provoke you regardless of your politics. When I say that it is superior to the psychological thrillers, sociopolitical statements and police procedurals released today, I do not do so to denounce all contemporary cinema as inferior to the "classics" nor to promote my "refined taste." I merely want to impress upon you how incomplete the life of any film lover is without seeing it -- and we live in a sad time when many people will speak of their love of cinema and never branch out of their own country's output nor even delve deeply into that nation's cinematic history -- and how I can still find this much to write about it after a number of viewings. M will make you ask more of the crime films you watch; more importantly, it will genuinely make you question the justice system and whether capital punishment is acceptable just because it makes us feel a bit better about life. Above all, though, it will show you (or remind you, if like me you haven't watched a Lang film in a while), that Fritz Lang is one of cinema's true originals. This is confirmed by Claude Chabrol, who made a short homage to M for the French TV program Cine parade. When asked about remaking some shots and making his own Langian spins on others, the New Wave director, famous for his own psychological thrillers, noted the difficulty of reproducing Lang's precise detail. I've spent nearly 3500 words discussing why the film sears into me, but Chabrol nicely cuts through the technique, the blocking, the commentary and everything else with six cautionary words to those who would aspire to this film: "Trying to imitate Lang is madness."

Contempt

[Note: I posted a short follow-up to the post that reflects a more positive viewing experience shortly after writing this review. At the time of this writing (6/1/2012), I would say I'm even more positive on the film than this review suggests, and that it is now one of my favorites by the director.]

Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt is a film of wild contradictions. Godard mocked its source-material, Alberto Moravia's Il disprezzo, yet he follows its plot with more loyalty that he does the source material within the source, Homer's Odyssey. He disdains any attempt to explain the film's largely uneventful plot through psychology, yet his take on the material clearly reflects aspects of his personal life. It contains a misogyny that I'm finding disturbingly prevalent in his work, yet, of the three Godard films I've seen so far, it is the only one to put a human stake on its sexism and give the woman a chance to defend herself.

Its protagonist, Paul (Michel Piccoli) is a low-paid screenwriter with a receding hairline and a stunning wife, Camille Javal (Bridgette Bardot). Once an author of detective fiction, he took the screenwriting gig for the money. Ironically, he's not really selling out by leaving behind writing pulp novels to pen an adaptation of The Odyssey for one of the greatest of film directors, Fritz Lang (playing himself). But Camille mentions that she misses the old Paul, and he retorts that he only took the job to pay for the apartment for the two of them.

Camille turns on him after spending time with Jeremy Prokosch (Jack Palance), the lascivious, obscene producer of Lang's film. She reacts coldly to his small-talk and shoots down his attempts to soften her up with a movie or a lunch and asks that they return to their apartment. I've learned by now to wait with bated breath for Jean-Luc Godard to take his camera inside an apartment; my favorite moments of both Breathless and Le Petit Soldat occurred in apartments and, true to form, the highlight of Contempt plays out in the couple's impressive flat. For 30 minutes, they move from room to room, arguing, reconciling and splintering once more. Paul's desperate attempts to make things right (despite having no clue what he's done wrong) make him sympathetic, but Camille delivers some justifiable reasons for her anger without ever directly stating them.

Here's where the dissonance between Godard's typical sexism and the deeper meaning of Bardot's character begins, as she gently subverts the stereotype of the blond ditz. Before, she indirectly "competed" for Paul with his translator, the brunette Francesca, who can not only speak four languages but discuss the poetry of Höberlin with Lang, and Camille dons a black wig in their apartment to look more intelligent to her husband. Through her cold shoulder, she brings out his paternalism and the vacuity with which he attempts to analyze her. He explains her behavior through materialism, via the apartment, through flightiness and other condescending conclusions, and for all his sincerity and likability, Paul gradually displays the traits that would lead someone who had to spend an extended amount of time with him crazy.

In that sense, perhaps Camille comes to stand in for Homer's Penelope, a allusion visually hinted at through contrasting images of Lang's footage of a naked woman swimming in the sea meant to be Penelope and a nearly identical shot near the end of Camille skinnydipping in the same area. I recently re-read The Odyssey for a World Literature course, and was struck by how hard it is to get a read of that character. On one hand, she could be a feminist's nightmare, an image of a woman incapably of functioning without her husband, whose primary action across the epic is to return to her room and cry herself to sleep. Yet she's also cunning and resourceful, capable of staving off the advances of suitors for a decade. In this version of The Odyssey, Odysseus actually sells his wife to the suitors -- the check Prokosch gives Paul before taking Camille home with him is clearly as much for the woman as it is for his screenplay -- and what we're seeing here is Penelope's reaction to losing the faith that kept her going. Camille perfectly understands what Paul doesn't, and in this context her revulsion is instantly justifiable. One could also compare Camille to Anna Karina -- highlighted by her use of the black wig -- and cinematographer Raoul Coutard might hold the key to unlocking the film when he calls it Godard's "love letter" to her; I can't yet say if Godard's sexism surfaces again in later films, but Contempt occasionally moves closer than its CinemaScope objective distance and shows an artist attempting to apologize for his mindset.

The couple's argument in the apartment is so revealing and powerful that, as with his other films, some of the magic dissipates when they finally go outside again. Though Prokosch motivates their spat, the subplot of Lang's production never jells smoothly with the crumbling marriage. Prokosch, with his arrogant disdain for the artistic process, clearly stands as the Poseidon of the film, for Paul and Lang. Near the beginning, Prokosch rants to Paul, via Francesca, about Lang's refusal to simply make a marketable film, but he has no suggestions of his own to offer. "Producers never now what they want," drawls Paul in response to the feckless sleaze. Interesting Lang, with his vaguely threatening Teutonic poise (complete with deliciously jaunty monocle), is the straight man of the film, the exasperated artist who attempts to make the film he wants to make as his screenwriter self-destructs and his producer throws tantrums because the director shot scenes as they were written, but in a way that made them art, not mass entertainment.

That contrast is perhaps the biggest of the film, or at least the one dearest to Godard, who, until this film fizzled at the box office, was being inexorably pushed into mainstream filmmaking. The walls of Contempt, set in a Rome that's eerily vacant, are mostly stark white, and Godard places primary-colored objects in front them. He especially likes to use red and blue, which form the three colors of both the French and American flags: one could interpret this as Paul (and Godard's) choice between sticking to arthouse filmmaking (as evidenced by the use of multiple languages through translators, thus making English dubbing difficult) and mass-entertainment.

This internal conflict is further symbolized by Prokosch here the doppelgänger Contempt's producer Joseph E. Levine, who butted heads with Godard throughout the production. Levine wanted a nude scene in the film to capitalize on Bardot's popularity, so Godard simply tacked one onto the beginning, subverting it by shifting focus from simple lust into a discussion in which Camille asks Paul if he finds various body parts of hers attractive. Ergo, it becomes about insecurity and what makes us lust, a nude scene that asks us why we like nude scenes. In a projection room, Lang speaks aloud Godard's distaste for having to shoot the film in CinemaScope (perhaps the film's lack of human connection can be attributed to Godard using CinemaScope's magnificence against itself): "It wasn't made for people," he sneers, "It's only good for snakes and funerals." The film's eventual financial failure may have spoiled Godard's chances for making bigger films, but the director sows clues throughout the picture that he would like nothing better than to skirt Hollywood's advances.

As with he did with his other features, Godard uses Contempt to dissect the cinema as a whole: its opening credits sequence, delivered with a voiceover narration listing the production credits and giving a brief synopsis of what is to come, depicts Raoul Coutard tracking actors until he reaches the end of the dolly track and turns his camera to look directly into the camera shooting the credits sequence. That shot, of Godard gazing into the camera headlong, serves as perhaps the easiest summary of his early work, and also what I find so myopic about it. I freely admit that Godard's range of knowledge is incredible; his deep understanding of poetry, classical art and philosophy will almost certainly embarrass me as I continue to work through his filmography largely unfamiliar with the majority of references I come across in connection with his movies. But there's nothing in Contempt that speaks to a larger truth than the artist's frustrations with business and romance.Once again, I find myself torn with a Godard film, wowed by his inventiveness and his ability to make the scenes rooted in one location the most vibrant of all, but I'm always interested to see how such an astronomically clever man always manages to think himself even cleverer. I always want to smack Godard after finishing one of his movies, but I also want to head straight to the library afterward. That's gotta count for something, right? And for all my continuing frustrations, Contempt shows the most of Godard the human being I've yet seen, and while I do not prefer it to either Breathless or Le Petit Soldat, I am more interested than ever in sticking to my commitment to consume his corpus.

Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler

Fritz Lang's 1922 silent epic, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, solidified the German director as one of the primary movers and shakers of early cinema. Less Expressionistic than his contemporaries Murnau or Weine, Lang drew more from the cinematic techniques of Griffith and Feuillade than the theater of Ernst Toller or Max Reinhardt. His early silent films varied between these two influences: he would make either artistic, Expressionist features (Destiny) or more commercial fare (Spiders). Dr. Mabuse changed that; it consolidated the two halves of Lang's prowess into a filmic language that could mix high concept artistry with populist entertainment.

Just as importantly, it displayed an undercurrent of political commentary that would define the masterpieces he made under the turbulent Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi Party. Mabuse (pronounced Mah- boo-zah), one of the great villains of any medium, is a master of disguise. Always donning some outlandish costume and make-up, he nevertheless blends into crowds with his gift for concealment. Having mental powers ranging from hypnotism to outright telepathy likely helps as well. Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who collaborated with Lang on many of his german classics, excels in the role, thoroughly over-the-top but with a hint of real madness that makes him scary. Mabuse's disguises make him a powerful foe, one who can wreak havoc and walk away unnoticed, with a network of completely loyal minions in high and low places; through, them he nearly brings down German society.

By dressing up Mabuse so often, Lang is commenting on the number of issues affecting postwar Germany, be it inner turmoil or the too-severe punishments forced upon the country in the Treaty of Versailles. Lang of course made an (arguably more famous) sequel, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, in which his character spouted rhetoric literally ripped from Goebbels' propaganda pieces, but the Mabuse of this film is more complex even as he is far more straightforward than the specter who pulls the strings in Testament.

Mabuse's first action of the film is to crash the stock market with a meticulously crafted plan. His henchman hijack a train in order to steal a trade agreement, shot in ingenious pre-Eistenstein montage, that highlights how pitch-perfect every cog in Mabuse's machine works. The henchmen steal the briefcase holding the agreement and throw it from the train, only for it to land neatly in the backseat of another henchman's car passing underneath (this also doubles as a tongue-in-cheek jab at the touted efficiency of German rail). When news of the stolen agreement reaches the market, prices plummet as a disguised Mabuse looks on and waits. As soon as prices fall to dangerously low levels, he buys up everything he can, and suddenly the agreement is returned, unmolested, sending stocks shooting straight back up.

For Mabuse to so casually play with the nation's economy, to make everything worthless so he can amass a fortune a few minutes later, clearly reflects the foreign demand for reparations. The harsh demands of the Treaty of Versailles bankrupted a country that already had to deal with the seismic shift from a powerful authoritarian state into a fledgling and directionless democracy, and Mabuse torments these people further.

Naturally, just because the nation plunged into debt didn't mean that a wealthy class ceased to exist. The aristocrats, now stripped of their nobility, choose to lose themselves in decadence to help them forget the trauma. They fill seedy, smoky dens, gambling away huge chunks of money, with access to any vice available to them with just a few code words so as not to attract the attention of the law.

Mabuse preys on these self-absorbed fools; at a variety house, he manages to hypnotize a young man, Hull, then follows him to a casino and bends the wealthy lad to play, and of course lose, numerous games of cards. Hull starts losing such massive sums of marks -- the intertitles say 50,000, but I suspect that this was done for the American release to play into our understanding of our own currency, as 50,000 paipermark in 1922 were valueless; by 1923, the excahnge rate between a mark and a dollar was 1,000,000:1. Even with the 150,000 he also owes, Hull only lost 20 cents -- that even the other rich patrons express concern. Mabuse takes the boy for all the money he has with him and an I.O.U. worth thrice that and makes his exit. When Hull snaps out of his spell, he doesn't even remember who he played against, and he finds that his last hand, which he folded, was a winning one.

The proper cut of Dr. Mabuse stretches to the 4-1/2 hour mark and was split into two parts upon its release. The first part presents its titular villain as a terrifying force, one who can attack anything or anyone at any time. He manipulates identifiable images such as the faces of cards and stock prices and switches room numbers and even sports a car with a revolving license plate (something directly lifted in the Bond film Goldfinger). In doing so, he's stripping the symbols that subtly supply our normalcy of their meaning, just as the identifiable aspects of old Prussia were now worthless in the anarchy of early Weimar Germany.

These of course were the early days of cinema, and the hero sent to stop the mysterious Dr. Mabuse is little more than a precise foil for the evil doctor. Interestingly, Mabuse has the country in such a state of fear that a government official, not an ordinary police detective, is dispatched to handle the problem. Norbert von Wenk, state prosecutor and Chief Inspector, too is a master of disguise and, not knowing what Mabuse looks like, lures the villain by gambling large amounts of money to attract attention. When Mabuse takes the bait, he finds that he cannot bend von Wenk to his will, but only through great effort on the prosecutor's part.

Each of them even manipulates a woman to get their dirty work done. At the cabaret club where Mabuse hypnotizes Hull, the young man never notices what is happening to him because he's enraptured with the exotic dancer Cara. Cara has the rich young men of Berlin eating out of her hand, and Mabuse eventually persuades her to submit to him, possibly not so much to use her to do his bidding as to eliminate the competition. This woman, the object of everyone's desire, obeys her new master out of inhuman devotion, as if the lusts of all those men who fancy her were somehow combined into a singular passion for the doctor. Von Wenk enlists the aid of Countess Told to give him an entry into the seedy backrooms of the rich. Ironically, it is the Countess who eventually refuses to perform her assigned tasks because of their immorality. Cara remains so loyal to her master than, when captured, she commits suicide rather than give anything to von Wenk.

If the Mabuse of the first part is an insoluble, unstoppable demon, the Mabuse of the second half becomes a tragic allegory for the state of Germany. The countess refuses to follow von Wenck's orders any longer, just as Mabuse discovers her and begins to fall in love. He drives her husband to suicide and works his charm on her, and through her he will eventually come undone.

That Mabuse would use his horrific schemes to win a mate is hardly a big step from his previous activities, but his actions are not as personal as they seem. Money means nothing to him; it's bankrupting aristocrats and affected the economy on a grand scale that gives him pleasure. Here at last is something that stirs his blood beyond pure evil, and where most directors would fall down trying to humanize their villains Lang's makes his film all the more disturbing in the doctor's struggle to woo the countess. He previously bent all but von Wenk to his will (and even then he nearly won), but his attempts to break her mentally, to force her to love him, fail. When at last Mabuse finds something he truly desires, he cannot affect it.

Focusing all of his attention on Countess Told leaves Mabuse's criminal empire without its customary precision, and he slowly ties and tightens his own noose. The newfound sloppiness gives von Wenk the foothold he needs to mount a successful takedown. Mabuse must also contend with the apparitions of some of his victims, who only add to his stress.

That is not to say that Mabuse's plans suddenly grind to a halt, however; in one spectacular sequence, he incites political activists to riot by convincing them that their hero is being transported to prison. Of course, the Weimar Republic suffered from both radicals and reactionaries, and both sides committed their share of violence.

At last Mabuse admits that he is slipping, confiding in the countess, “I haven’t been the same since I met you. I’ve been making mistakes.” When von Wenk finally catches him, the doctor's hair is white and unkempt, and the madmen is sent to an institution. Here Lang's film takes on an unintended relevance, albeit one he perhaps noted later as The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is needed to flesh it out: Mabuse, the stand-in for anarchic decadence in postwar Germany, is locked away, presumably crushing his organization without its leader. In 1924, following a failed coup that left many party members dead, the German government sentenced nazi leader Adolf Hitler to prison, hoping to nip the growing nuisance in the bud. However, he emerged from his (actually quite lightweight) sentence with Mein Kampf and turned the Nazi Party into a true political force. Further parallels between Hitler and Mabuse's intersecting stories will be discussed when I get around to reviewing The Testament of Dr. Mabuse.

Lang's style throughout this epic is unassailable. For a 4-1/2 film, especially a silent one, it moves at a brisk pace that demands attention. Compare this even to early montage maestros Griffith and Eisenstein (who reportedly honed his montage skills while editing a print of this film for Russian distribution); Griffith's films plod through turgid patches of melodrama for much of their running lengths, and even Battleship Potemkin bogs down when it gets into its purely propagandic moments. The only real drag occurs in the first part which lacks a real structure in its depiction of Mabuse's frightening powers.

One must also marvel at the technique. Lang captures night life in the city as no one else had previously: the headlights of speeding cars, the streetlamps and building lights stretching back as far as the eye can see, all captured in total clarity. His Berlin is realistic but also abstract, moving through the backrooms of society -- the stripteases, the casinos, the opium dens -- none of which offer any clue to their locations in the city. Figures often appear in open door frames, but even when they don't we must remain on-guard to see where Lang will take us next.

The Expressionism of Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler is chiefly confined to the overblown performances and the camera tricks that Lang pulls to demonstrate Mabuse's mental powers at work. But the mixture of these stylized performances and his realistic but inventive photography effectively set down the blueprint for film noir 20 years before The Maltese Falcon "launched" the genre and nearly a decade before his own M cemented the style.

Mabuse himself speaks of Expressionism; while attending a soirée essentially in person (but still drawing on a persona that he presents to the public), someone asks him what he thinks of the movement, and he replies, "Expressionism is a mere pastime -- but why not? Everything today is pastime!" Perhaps Lang uses the line as a fun poke at the art form, that it's no deeper or more meaningful than any other type of art and that he just wants to create. I though see it as evidence of Mabuse's lack of emotional connection: art is merely a trifle for him because it's designed to provoke an emotional response, and he cares only for panic. He does not understand passion, which is why his inability to handle his feelings for Countess Told undo him.

Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler is one of the finest silent films I've ever seen, and one of the few that draws me in beyond distanced admiration (other examples being Chaplin and Keaton films as well as Murnau's Nosferatu and Sunrise). Its pacing, acting, story and themes had caught up in the film even as I couldn't stop comparing it to the history of the Weimar Republic as I watched it. In Dr. Mabuse I see the blueprint for Hannibal Lecter, or the Joker; his ability to plan 10 steps ahead for every scheme makes him far more terrifying than a hands-on killer, and his psychological warfare with von Wenk and indeed the whole of Germany is more entertaining than just about any slasher pic I could care to mention. Lang's name primarily comes up in connection with Metropolis and M, masterpieces both, but Dr. Mabuse should be required viewing for cinephiles and a fine film to show to your more philistine friends who would likely never give a silent film a chance.