You won't be disappointed!

Simply A Masterpiece

Overrated and overhyped

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

I really urge you to watch this, but watch beyond the caper, watch the character beyond the simply nefarious evil mastermind that he appears as, and you'll be stunned with the the complexity of forces at work; at the center is a man who - having mastered the mind - can guide vision into shaping worlds and, from the inverse point-of-view of the unwitting victims, the shaped world as the stage of some indecipherable, chaotic spiel.So what this really is, is the precursor of film noir. The genre as later assumed by American hands - once Germans fled there - transferred Mabuse out of sight, but the fundamental movement remains: we had to assume the notion that somewhere, on a cosmic station above, the images that down here formed reality were being controlled and manipulated. What the protagonists in these films experienced as a world of fertile, opportunous chaos, and would therefore exploit to their own advantage, was eventually revealed to be a chimera of the mind led astray; the world was being supervised and kept in ledgers all along.This is pretty amazing stuff to have then; we can see the manipulator inside the manipulated world, and the motions that bring consequences on both ends of the illusion. The first scene shows Mabuse dealing cards with on them the faces of the players, the actors who are about to perform in the orchestrated fiction - Mabuse's inside the film, and also Lang's film about Mabuse. And there is a woman who is our surrogate viewer in all this; she watches the gamblers from a distance, searching faces for thrills and sensations. All this touches at the heart of self-referential cinema in ways that still astound by how erudite, how in-sightful. Viewers who are looking for films about the mind weaving films will be delighted. There is one scene that will be absolutely unequaled in film until the second great cinema of Resnais and Tarkovsky some forty years later. It shows Mabuse operating an illusion on stage before a packed theater; the entire audience watches transfixed at people magically walking out of a screen into the middle of the auditorium - and vanishing at a snap of the fingers - none of them realizing the confrontation that is actually playing out within the fantasy.But there is an extra layer that further elevates this. So what is perceived by the players as unluck or the chance turn of a card, from our double perspective rooted in Mabuse's mind is revealed as part of the same, decisive plan. Yet Mabuse is not a godlike presence, he is steeped in human passions; icy but on occasion petulant, seething, lusting, the mask full of emotional cracks.So, on one level we have a controlled reality as a puppet show of absurdities, but on the other end finally we get a glimpse of the mind cracking under the weight of what it must control, under the burden of the operated illusion. The final vision is a nightmare where these controlled images animate themselves against their tyrant. Tellingly it happens in a locked room; the blind people that were tasked by Mabuse to deal with his fortunes, in fact his counterfeit fortunes, now transform into apparitions of guilt.Few films have so deeply influenced our cinematic vision, from Vertigo to Lynch. It has been since disguised and embellished, but it's revealed here for the first time.

After watching this movie -- which has an immense reputation and less than immense execution, one wonders -- what gets a movie in the pantheon of great films? Is it reputation of the director? Is it the fact this movie probably is the first noteworthy film featuring a super-villain? Is it the good reviews from 1922? Or is it that the sequel to this movie (Testament of Dr. Mabuse) is brilliant, and, frankly, everything this one is supposed to be? Watching this film -- it is hard to figure out the answer. Because this film is a pretty good example of a talented filmmaker gone wrong, rather than anything intrinsically brilliant.First of all, this film is far, far too long. Much of the film is spent with the exposition of Dr. Mabuse's fiendish plots, which are somewhat less, well, earth-shatteringly fiendish than one might expect. There are long scenes of silent actors chatting in front of indifferent sets, with lengthy title cards outlining the Doctor's miserable plots, or the investigator's complicated investigations.Second, rather surprisingly for a film this length, the characters are not well developed. Mabuse, as a human being (as opposed to a mannequin for the makeup artist's art) really does not emerge until the second hour of the film. The film's only interesting character -- the countess who is so bored with life that she goes to the gambling dens to watch everyone else destroy themselves -- gets good moments in the second half of part one, but then just becomes a damsel in distress for most of the second part.Third -- quite honestly, the plot is stupid. The great scheme occupying Mabuse for the bulk of this picture is the good doctor using his skills at hypnotism and disguise to force rich people to lose to him at cards. He could have saved us all a lot of bother if he just hypnotized those same rich people to write him a check. While, in many films of this type, the plots are equally daft, one is forced to spend more time with it because of the length of the film. There are plot twists in this movie that would be embarrassing in a B minus PRC film featuring Lionel Atwill. And, in this one, we get the prototype of a villain so in love with complicated methods of murder, that he has trouble actually getting his murder's accomplished.Fourth, for a crime film, the action scenes just aren't that suspenseful. This a bit of surprise -- in Lang's immediately preceding film "Destiny" -- he displays an extraordinary mastery of pacing, and generating suspense. But in that movie, Lang crowds a lot of plot in a reasonably brief running time and creates a core of sympathetic characters. In this one, there really is not all that much going on for large spaces of the film, and the main character is decidedly not sympathetic.This is not to say this is a bad film. It isn't. There are some great sequences scattered here and there =-- particularly when Mabuse and the investigator out to destroy him sit down to a game of cards. Also, there is no denying that it has been influential. But, if you are searching out good Mabuse, The Testament of Dr Mabuse is a better choice.

This film has a plot that is so detailed, so developed, and so complex, that no one would believe it was a silent film. As the plot develops, the character of Dr. Mabuse changes drastically. In Part I, he is an impossibly clever and cunning criminal. He is introduced as a master of disguise who carries out an almost victimless crime with the stock markets. He is not evil, he is just a criminal. But then, you see him hypnotize a rich man in to gambling away large sums of money, abusing his skill as a psychoanalyst, and aiming to ruin and drive insane an innocent man. When state prosecutor von Wenk is introduced, you get the impression that you do not know what Mabuse is capable of.Later, in the film's most memorable scene, the state prosecutor, in disguise, enters a club and goes straight to the card table. There is Dr. Mabuse, in the disguise of a feeble old man. As the state prosecutor takes up his cards, the words TSI-NAN-FU begin to chase him. He is falling under the spell of Dr. Mabuse, and you see the grim determination in the eyes of Mabuse, and you see that he will stop at nothing to rob and kill the state prosecutor. This is the first time that you see true evil in Mabuse.After that, Mabuse seems troubled. He lives by the bottle, and is stern with his accomplices. He shows no mercy to Edgar Hull, the rich man he robbed, and lures him in to a deathtrap with the seductress Carrozza, who is caught. Although Mabuse could easily have gotten her out of prison, he does not bother, he instead, unveiling all his evil, kidnaps Countess Told, and locks her in the room where Carroza lived, showing that he is not going to rescue her, despite her love and claims that he is the greatest man in the world for him.And so Part II begins, with several evil goings on, all the fault of Dr. Mabuse. The Countess will not love Mabuse, Mabuse is slowly driving the Count insane, and Carrozza is still in prison, refusing to reveal to the state prosecutor that Dr. Mabuse is the "Mystery Man" they're looking for. Mabuse does not wish to free Carrozza, he wishes to kill the state prosecutor. He hypnotizes the Count, and commands him to kill himself, and the Count's butler tells the state prosecutor that the Count's treatment only became poor when Dr. Mabuse was visiting. This throws suspicion on Dr. Mabuse for the first time. He handles it gracefully, he blames a hypnotist (him in disguise) who is holding a show that night. This lures the State prosecutor to come to the show, where Mabuse picks people out of the crowd, and convinces them to do random things. Then he takes the State Prosecutor on stage, and puts him in a trance, just before he slips into the trance, he identifies Dr. Mabuse. Mabuse hypnotizes van Wenk to drive off a cliff, but he is saved at the last minute and brings police over to arrest Mabuse. Mabuse and his men stay and fight, but are overpowered, and Dr. Mabuse is forced to flee through an underground passage to his other base, where he counterfeits money. And finds himself unable to get out. He goes insane, and is apprehended. Poetic justice, we have now lost all sympathy for this demented man.Such is a detailed plot that is too sophisticated to be told properly through title cards, and it may require several viewings to understand certain parts. On other elements of film craft than story, first is photography. This is a film with excellent angles and distances, and even a few tracking shots. As well, the use of double exposures and the iris shot show things that can best be expressed through visuals, such as the double exposure showing the face of Mabuse over the stock market.Rudolf Klein-Rogge gives one of the best performances in all of silent film as the demented arch-criminal Dr. Mabuse. His eyes seem to stare straight into your soul, and he never ceases to be convincing in the final scene. But best of all is when he says TSI-NAN-FU, with the utmost and purest of evil contorting his mouth, flaring his nostrils, and freezing his eyes.And finally, this film has excellent expressionistic sets: most notably Schramm's Grill, Mabuse's house, the corner it is at, the Count's mansion, and the club where Edgar Hull meets his demise: 11 Hayden street. All in all, this film is a masterpiece in plot, acting, and every other element of film craft. This is the greatest of all silent films.

Dr. Mabuse is a name familiar to almost everyone in Germany, but most Americans would have to be told that he's a criminal mastermind, psychiatrist, gambler and hypnotist with supernatural powers. Mabuse is notable for his brilliant disguises and his gang of minions who conspire against people and institutions for the sole purpose of bringing power and wealth to himself. This evil genius is known only as The Great Unknown to those who wish to stop him. Mabuse was created by Norbert Jacques for a novel which has never been out of print in Germany. The director of this film, Fritz Lang, claimed him for his own; and now Mabuse is known not as a character in a novel but as a character in three Fritz Lang films, the first of which is this innovative and hugely influential silent movie.Lang's storytelling techniques are especially innovative, but later spy films, including Lang's own, have greatly improved on what's here and leave modern viewers alert to the slow pace, murky details and confusing plot twists. What hasn't been improved upon is the artistry behind the photographic effects. I don't mean the effects themselves: modern special effects are infinitely more sophisticated. This film's effects have a great impact even—or especially—on today's viewer who is accustomed to a rapid-fire series of elaborate, gaudy computer-generated pictures, like those in, say, Peter Jackson's "King Kong." Nothing in that film is as memorable to me as this movie's scene where the camera closes in on Mabuse and everything around him goes dark, leaving only one glowing, malevolent head floating in the blackness.The highly exaggerated style of acting from everyone in the cast would look idiotic if seen in isolated bits. Von Welk (Bernhard Goetzke), tilting back his head and crossing his eyes as Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) hypnotizes him, would have been a perfect clip for Jay Ward's "Fractured Flickers." As part of this film, every melodramatic moment from the cast is effective in a way that a more naturalistic style can never be.Fans of the Mabuse films, which number many more than just Lang's three, are sometimes disappointed by this first incarnation. This Mabuse allows himself violent emotional outbursts, while the later version is marked by icy self-control. The more familiar Mabuse may be an improvement over this one, but they don't quite replace him, and those films don't quite replace this one. This is a treasure for film historians, and indirectly a treasure for fans of the countless movies influenced by it.For those who simply want a good movie, there's plenty here to reward them, provided they are very, very patient.