User Reviews

Late in life, after finding success in Hollywood, Fritz Lang returned to Germany after the "economic miracle" had unfolded and the US had rebuilt West Germany into a "modern capitalist democracy." This film, the director's last, is at first glance a standard, if effective, thriller. But a remotely less cursory viewing show it to be a critique of the filmmaker's home-country as he found it upon his return. Most of the action takes place in a hotel that has retained its Nazi-era capacity for complete surveillance of its inhabitants. This technology falls into the hands of a faceless master-criminal currently thought dead who once tried to take over the world. To even call this allegory is perhaps a step far. Lang clearly sees in the "new Germany" a social apparatus waiting to be usurped by a resurgent fascism, one that has only become dormant, not dead.

The only non-radical note in the movie is that the handsome protagonist is an American industrialist, a necessary concession, perhaps, as it was this class of person who financed this film.

The location and language is not the only way in which Lang here returns to his roots. The set pieces of the hotel clearly call to mind the Expressionism of his early years.

Fritz Lang's final movie saw him return to one of his greatest creations, the enigmatic criminal master Dr. Mabuse. Much like the influence this villain has over people in the movies, so was the influence he had over Lang, who made three distinct Dr. Mabuse movies in three different periods of his life.

In The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse we go to post-war Germany. Mysterious, ingenious crimes are succeeding one after another, so brilliant in technique that the police remember the crimes of Dr. Mabuse, just before Hitler took over.

Meanwhile a rich American industrialist is in Germany to close a deal. At the Luxor Hotel he saves a woman from committing suicide. But this altruistic gesture plunges him into a world of deception, blackmail, voyeurism and international crime.

Trying to get to the bottom of this is Commissioner Kras, with the help of a shifty insurance salesman and a blind psychic.

Lang's movies have always been ahead of their time. His silent movies showed an amazing understanding of the language of cinema, and when sound came he incorporated it into the movie as a storytelling tool and not just an excuse for talking heads. In this movie we see the genesis of modern thrillers like the Bond franchise: secret criminal empires, shadowy villains, cars with intricate gadgets, the use of secret cameras to spy on people, unique weapons. But even after fifty years, here it still looks fresh and bold.

Much like The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, this is one of the best thrillers I've ever seen. It's suspenseful, it's surprising, and it's intelligent. Kras is not the moronic policeman we see so often in cinema; he's clever, he's good at deducing things. And Dr. Mabuse is always one step ahead, always has contingency plans, knows everything. How distant he is from the barely-articulate villains of our times.

Any film lover will do himself a favor by watching this neglected gem.

The original "Mabuse" films were a silent film from 1922 and an early sound film. All were from Fritz Lang and concerned a criminal genius--sort of like a Blofeld-type character. Well, in this film, many decades have passed and a new series of brilliant crimes are being perpetrated and they have all the earmarks of the work of Mabuse. But could he be alive after all these years? With the help of a psychic (who looks really cool and creepy) and some seemingly irrelevant subplots (they do come together later), detective Gert Fröbe ("Goldfinger") and his team unravel the mystery and end the film with a dandy climax. Interestingly enough, Fröbe strongly resembles Inspector Lohmann from the 1933 Mabuse film.

I must admit that I had a lot of trouble staying awake during the first half of the film--there were just so many weird and confusing characters that I found my attention wandering. However, I was thrilled that after a while, all the machinations and confusing plot elements actually paid off with a dandy ending that made the film worth while. However, for fans of director Fritz Lang, this film isn't among his better films but it is pretty good entertainment.

Knowing the film very well, having recently watched it again and reading the reviews here, I felt prompted to write a really objective review. That being said, I know that nobody can be objective, but I'll do my best. Let me precede with saying that I'm absolutely not the kind of person to dismiss old films quickly just because I view them with hindsighted, biased modern eyes. But this is a rather bad film, and even so from a 1960's point of view. One can not shake the feeling that this film has simply been canonized and granted diplomatic immunity just because it was directed by the great Fritz Lang. Sadly, the discussion of this film seems to have been reduced to this only factor: Its director. Yes, Lang WAS a great director for his time, but that does not mean that all of his films are great. This one is not good. Was it Lang's fault? I have my theory. If this film interests you, please read on, even if you're appalled by my pointing out of the film's shortcomings. I don't want to spoil my own review, but I don't think any of these weaknesses are Lang's fault. Here we go:

As usual, let's start with the redeeming qualities: The direction of the actors and the camera work is great for its time, the one noticeable set - the clairvoyant Cornelius' office - is really beautifully and imaginatively made, and Gert Fröbe and Peter van Eyck are simply great actors. With their style they easily meet current standards in acting (as they are mainly playing derivates of their real-life personalities, which in my opinion always has been a key to success, and never a bad thing anyway). Furthermore, Lang wanted to be critical of the not so long defunct Nazi regime, as wanted his producer Artur Brauner. One of the film's lesser mentioned manifestations in this regard are the allusions to Joseph Goebbels: The clubfooted Roberto Menil, the dog ...

But that seems to be about it. The film otherwise is full of inconstistencies and shortcomings that must not only have been noticed by modern film buffs, but also by people back then. What sets this film back? Here are the reasons that in my opinion make it impossible to call the film 'great'.

First of all, there is its whole scenic approach. One could say they wanted to create the feeling of an intimate play, but that can't be true, as some parts of the film desperately try to be grand - and fail. Most obvisously, there are no establishing shots whatsoever, and only very few wide shots, which are always what make a film grand. The single shot passing as an establisher is the face of the hotel, but even this one leaves one without any orientation or feeling of expanse. There are also no shots of contemporary Berlin, and very few outdoor shots. Exceptions are the murder in a car early on in the film, Travers picking up Cornelius, or the climactic car chase. But even those shots show no sign of largesse, nor do they provide a real sense of orientation - something that doesn't fit Lang.

And then there is the breaking down of scenes. Many of them are downright painful to watch, as again many times you are left alone without any orientation. One of the more obvious examples is the scene where Commissioner Kras is watching Travers and Cornelius leaving in their car - there's no shot of their car actually driving away. That would have been filmmaking one on one, even at the time. And why are there no more shots of Cornelius during the scene with the speaker phone in Kras' office? Why are there so few cutaways to people talking with other people? And so on. Re-watch it with open eyes and you will see what I mean. The film is full of such occurences. Even the partly cheesy German Edgar Wallace films of the period did better. Mostly.

And then there is the storyline's filmic execution. There are so many inonsistencies that it would by far exceed the scope of this review, but here are a few: At first, there are almost no foreshadowings whatsoever. The obvious question 'Who is Mabuse' is no big riddle, as there are only few characters introduced as possible culprits, or they die soon enough to be out of the loop. The only viable suspects are Cornelius and Professor Jordan (how lame is that, as they are both the culprit in the end), and a barely viable red herring is Mistelzweig, but that's about it. The big chance to establish Travers as a suspect has been missed. It's all too clear that he is a victim. Another annoying thing: Various characters die without ever getting an introduction, but stay important for the rest of the the film. At a certain point you simply give up and convince yourself that you are watching an intelligent murder-mystery, numbed by the fact that it's a Fritz Lang film.

And Mabuse's final reveal is so lame that it defies words. Professor Jordan simply taking off his beard and his wig - which doesn't change his looks much anyway - is a great disappointment at a point where you must long have figured out what's going on. And there is no payoff whatsoever to the realization that he's also Cornelius. The simple solution would have been to show Mabuse as Cornelius drop his mask, not as Jordan. But for some reason they didn't think of that. It's just one of the many missed chances in the film. In the end you even have to ask yourself why Cornelius as a character was even there. Why did Mabuse act as clairvoyant? He didn't use that persona for anything useful. Why doesen't he coerce Travers into anyting? He even saves Kras - first he places him in the deadly chair during the seance, then he warns him? It's never made clear why. I could go on and on.

OK, so the film is flawed. But let's cut to the chase: I can't believe that all of this was Lang's fault. He has proven time and time again that he knows about the things I so arrogantly point out as shortcomings here - he even helped establishing some of them as rules being taught at film school. So why this mediocre final result?

When watching the film closely, it's obvious that there's a very good film hidden in there somewhere, but circumstances must have prevented it from coming to light. Was it budget restraints? Producer interference? I've read somewhere that CCC's Artur Brauner was known for that, but I can't say for sure. I think it was both. There is a scene with Van Eyck at the hotel during the last act where the music just stops abruptly at the cut, which is a clear indication for the fact that a scene was cut even after picture lock and mixing. An indication that there was a scene there that we will never see. And this obviously couldn't have been the only one. Why is there no shot of Cornelius at the other end of the speaker phone? Because Preiss was not available anymore and they could use the voice artist that spoke Cornelius' voice (Siegfried Schürenberg in the German version). Why not shoot Traver's car leaving? Why not shoot Commissioner Kras watching Mabuse's car sinking to the bottom of the lake? Why not shoot countless establishers and counter shots? No time, no actors there, no money. For me, that's the only explanation.

As a result, the film has become so disjointed, so confusing, so full of missed opportunities and so full of Chekhov's Guns that it's a pity that it was the great Fritz Lang's last film.

I know it's no use giving a film two out of ten stars after everyone involved in it is dead and apparently there is nothing to be learned from. But so is giving a film ten stars when it's just not a ten star film. What's film critizising for anyway?

If you want to see this with two different experiences, try to see this first in the original German, and then the English dubbed version. It's obvious that from just watching the dubbed version that the original version is a superb thriller while the dubbed version is an unintentional comedy. The reciting of the lines are so overly dramatic that they become very funny, even though the original actors seemed to be mouthing some of the scenes in English. One scene has someone telling another person that a character is dead, saying that line as if they are around the corner, parking the car and will be there soon.

The film intertwines two stories at it gets underway. There's the sudden death of a reporter in a rather gruesome manner, and the attempted suicide of an unhappy wife. She manages to be pulled back from jumping off the roof, but as the two stories intertwine, the macabre elements become very chilling.

Then there's the rumored return of the sinister Dr. Mabuse from the dead and the variety of creepy characters who come in and out of the action, making you wonder if the notorious mastermind criminal is one of them or has had his thoughts implanted into them. Dawn Addams, Peter van Eyck and Gert Frobe are convincing in the pantomime they have underneath the dubbing which has to be heard to be believed.

It is interesting to discover or rediscover Fritz Lang. He was well known for one film, Metropolis, and then for a few American films, films he shot in the USA. But the full set of Dr Mabuse's films is fascinating in a way because it provides a rare vision on the German cinema from the early 1920s to 1960. The eye looking at the world from a German point of view that spans over Hitler, Nazism and the Second World War is Fritz Lang's. We know him for his highly symbolical Metropolis in which the meaning is built by visual and numerical symbols. In this Dr Mabuse it is different. There are quite a lot of symbols but inherited from the silent cinema of the old days, symbols that are there only to make clear a situation that had been depicted previously with pictures and no words, or a page of intertitles. Fritz Lang still uses that technique in his 1960 film, which is a long time overdue for a silent cinema technique. But that is a style, nothing but a way of speaking, not a meaning. The meaning is absolutely bizarre. Dr Mabuse is a highly criminal person but his objective is not to commit crimes in order to get richer or whatever. It is to control the world through his criminal activity. The world is seen as basically negative, leading to chaos and overexploitation, leading to anarchistic crime and nothing else because the only objective of this modern world is to make a profit by all means available. Dr Mabuse is a master mind of his time and for him crime is the only way to destroy that capitalistic world that he never calls capitalistic or Kapitalismus and to replace it with pure chaos that should be able to bring a regeneration, a rejuvenating epiphany, a re-founding experience. We find in his mind what we could find in some of the most important criminal minds in this world, like Carlos in France, or Charles Manson in the USA, or those sects that practice mass suicide in order to liberate the suicidees and to warn the world about the coming apocalypse. It is the mind and thinking of those who practice war as a revolutionary activity with a fundamentalist vision of their religions or politics and the world that is supposed to reflect that religion. They do not want to build a different society and when they are in power they are constantly aiming at antagonizing their own population and the world because they cannot exist if they do not feel some opposition that they can negate, bring down, crush, like in Iran, or in Germany with Hitler, though later on it was not much different under the Communists in East Germany. These visions need opposition to exist and they provoke that opposition by aiming at taking the control of the world with violence and imposing their control with more violence. That's Dr Mabuse, the main brain of a criminal decomposition and re-composition of society on an absolutely antagonistic vision of life. But that vision is very common. Just as common as this phrase "a half full glass is nothing but a half empty glass". Add antagonism to that dual vision and then you have a struggle to the death between the half empty glass that wants to be full and the half full glass that wants to be empty (or full?), one half only wanting to take what the other half has and impose his half to the other half to make the world one by the elimination of the other side of the coin. That dual antagonistic vision is the popular and shrivelled up approach of the communist catechism of Stalin, inherited from Marx's French son in law Paul Lafargue, or of course in all dictatorship that reduces life to a little red book, to one hundred quotations from the master thinker of the revolution. That's the world you feel in these films. Fritz Lang embodies this ideology of the mentally poor in that criminal character of his: kill, rob, steal, counterfeit. Even if you die when doing so, the world will change and remember. The master criminal has to die in his activity in order to regenerate the world. What Fritz Lang introduced in his double main feature of the early 1920s and in his Testament, is that the master brain of this vision internalizes this paranoid and psychotic vision of the world into himself and has to become psychotic himself and it is in his psychosis that he finds the energy to conquer the world again. In the third film, Dr Mabuse has been dead for a long time and is reincarnated by someone who finds his inspiration in the doctor. That is a far-fetched cinematographic and fictional antic that is necessary as a reference but brings nothing to the vision itself. A few years later that ideology was to conquer our imagination in many ways. First the Berlin Wall became the symbol of that vision the way it was carried and conveyed to the world by the East-German communists. Then we have to think of the various revolutionary movements like Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, Die Rote Armee Fraktion, to take some German examples. But think of the French Mesrine and the Italian revolutionary urban guerilla warfare movements and you will have a fair picture of this psychotic criminal mind copied and pasted into the political field. The Maoist Red Guard and Cultural Revolution movement was quite typical of this approach. All that was going to come in 1960 and we must admit Fritz Lang was seeing ahead of his time, just as he had seen Hitler in his Testament of Dr Mabuse: a political leader based on hypnosis and mesmerizing people into blindly following a band of criminals.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

The story meanders about but comes together nicely by the conclusion. The identity of Dr Mabuse, watching the comings and goings in Luxor Hotel with his many eyes, did surprise me probably due to good acting by Wolfgang Preiss in his two roles. Effective acting by Gert Fröbe as the impish Commissioner Kras, Dawn Addams as the confused Marion Menil and Werner Peters as the ambiguous Hieronymus B. Mistelzweig help the film along. The cinematography is not particularly outstanding but the sets are attractive and the location filming when it happens is adequate. On the whole an entertaining movie.

The character of Dr. Mabuse began his cinematic career in 1922 and was revived in the 1960s but does translate well to the modern era, which is the mark of a good filmic supervillain. Why can't there be a Dr. Mabuse film in the 21st Century? He'll fit right in. (PS A friend tells me there was a Dr. Mabuse film made in the USA in 2013 but they say it was't that good.)

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.

Lang comes full circle: Mabuse made his name forty years earlier, and here Mabuse closes out his directorial career. Made on a shoestring budget with pretty obviously cardboard-quality sets, this is nonetheless nearly up to the level of the director's finest work, the fatalism and paranoia, the distrust of government and big business every bit as potent if not more so in the era of TV and jet aircraft as it was in the years before Hitler came to power.

The plot is so complex and takes so many quick turns that, less than 2 weeks after seeing it, I'm already at a loss to readily describe it. Suffice it to say that a TV reporter dies in his car in traffic; at first, no foul play is suspected but soon it's found that he has a needle embedded in his brain, fired from some experimental weapon. Meanwhile a young woman connected with the anchorman tries to commit suicide -- she is saved by an American businessman, who soon becomes embroiled in the intrigue which in addition to an SF weapon involves 1-way mirrors, cameras watching nearly everyone's every move, a seer/magician and exploding telephones. Really, describing the plot would ruin much of the fun.

Gert Frobe is really excellent as the police inspector in charge of the case; like a great many Americans I know him only as "Goldfinger" but he shows great ability here as a world-weary but still committed, intelligent and canny cop. The rest of the cast is solid, the crisp B/W photography and music all work to establish a claustrophobic, dangerous atmosphere....the VHS tape I watched was of surprisingly high quality. Not quite as engaging or exciting as the first two in the series, but still a more than fitting end to one of the greatest directorial careers in cinema.