Fritz Lang is a talented director. He's the guy who made "Metropolis," a startling vision of the future before such visions were cool. And he made "M", which turned a monster into an object of pity. In America, after slipping out of Germany, he directed a couple of fascinating noirs.
But you wouldn't know it from "Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse." Even the always-interesting presence of Peter Van Eyck, Hollywood's Ur-German, and the almost unrecognizable Wolfgang Preiss, can't save this from being a fairly typical B-movie with a plot more confusing than most.
After an opening that might have come directly from a Charlie Chan movie -- a victim collapses in public, shot in the head with an almost undetectable sliver of metal -- we are taken to a garishly made-up Dawn Addams perched on the ledge of a tall building, about to jump for reasons we know not of.
She's talked in by Van Eyck and there follow innumerable perplexing plot developments organized around a couple of themes that don't seem to have much to do with one another.
Lang often made good use of mirrors and he does so here. And Gert Frobe turns in a good performance as a shambling, good-natured, pipe-smoking detective.
The story, though, is full of incidents that may be suspenseful in themselves without helping the plot in an immediate way. It plods along like somebody with a club foot.
It's a disappointing piece of work, slow and uninteresting. Fans of Fritz may get more out of it than I did.
But you wouldn't know it from "Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse." Even the always-interesting presence of Peter Van Eyck, Hollywood's Ur-German, and the almost unrecognizable Wolfgang Preiss, can't save this from being a fairly typical B-movie with a plot more confusing than most.
After an opening that might have come directly from a Charlie Chan movie -- a victim collapses in public, shot in the head with an almost undetectable sliver of metal -- we are taken to a garishly made-up Dawn Addams perched on the ledge of a tall building, about to jump for reasons we know not of.
She's talked in by Van Eyck and there follow innumerable perplexing plot developments organized around a couple of themes that don't seem to have much to do with one another.
Lang often made good use of mirrors and he does so here. And Gert Frobe turns in a good performance as a shambling, good-natured, pipe-smoking detective.
The story, though, is full of incidents that may be suspenseful in themselves without helping the plot in an immediate way. It plods along like somebody with a club foot.
It's a disappointing piece of work, slow and uninteresting. Fans of Fritz may get more out of it than I did.