If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

I'll tell you why so serious

Awesome Movie

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

For nearly three decades, the visionary and brilliantly gifted writer/director Fritz Lang lived in the United States, because he fled from the Nazis and particularly from Joseph Goebbels who banned all of his previous films. But during the late fifties he returned to his home country Germany and completed the final three films of his rich career. Of course he couldn't retire without dedicating one last film to the character that is probably his most personally dearest and convoluted creation: Dr. Mabuse! The ingeniously and aptly titled "The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse" is in fact a belated but direct sequel to Lang's 1933 masterpiece "The Testament of Dr. Mabuse". It's a convoluted but extremely intelligent and hugely compelling mystery/crime thriller, with many characters and even more plot twists and secret story lines to discover. Some of the plot aspects are obvious and predictable, but most of the film is very surprising and incredibly fascinating! TV journalist Peter Barker dies in his car in the middle of an intersection, but what initially seems to be death by heart-attack turns out to be a case of vile murder committed by an ultra-advanced weapon that fires needles of steel into the victims' brains. Police Commissioner Kras was informed about the murder from beforehand, by the mysterious blind clairvoyant Peter Cornelius, and the modus operandi of the murder is very reminiscent to a murder committed nearly 30 years ago, by the henchmen of criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse. The investigation of this crime, as well as several other peculiar and unsolved murders, leads to the Luxor Hotel. While commissioner Kras meets up with some interesting people at the bar, like an insurance agent and a hotel detective, we are introduced to two other guests, namely the beautiful young lady Marion who's about to commit suicide by jumping off the hotel's balcony, and the gentle and wealthy American industrialist Henry Travers who's courageous enough to save her. What connects all these individual people to the murder of journalist Peter Barker? And what's the link with Dr. Mabuse, who allegedly died in a mental asylum 30 years earlier? "The 1.000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse" almost entirely revolves on suspenseful plotting and the intriguing rebirth of Lang's titular anti-hero protagonist. This film doesn't feature those beautiful expressionist trademarks anymore, like the case in the 1922 and 1933 films. That's okay, though, since the film was released in an entirely different era and focuses on more contemporary relevant things, like espionage and violent gimmicks such as exploding telephones and new kinds of artillery. However, one thing that Fritz Lang definitely kept alive in his post-WWII Dr. Mabuse movie is the criticism towards Germany's fascist past, ha! Apart from a terrific screenplay and a wondrously grim atmosphere, "The 1.000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse" can also rely on a whole series of impeccable acting performances. Gert Fröbe, known as one of the best James Bond villains in "Goldfinger", is excellent as the skeptical police inspector in charge of the investigation. Other great performances come from Peter Van Eyck, Dawn Addams, Wolfgang Preiss and Werner Peters. Cult fanatics will also definitely recognize Jess Franco regular Howard "Dr. Orloff" Vernon in a delightful supportive role as merciless hit man. The reincarnation of Dr. Mabuse's character also meant the start of several more sixties' sequels, and I plan to watch them all … one day. Great stuff, warmly recommended to fans of Fritz Lang, but also to admirers of good "Krimi" (crime) thrillers.

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

Eccentric characters are drawn to the Luxor Hotel where a panicked and paranoid pretty lady (Addams) is attempting to kill herself to be rid of her fears forever. Van Eyck saves her, falls in love, but also under the influence of the nefarious "Dr. Mabuse". He's the old "prophet" who the police go to -- or is he? No, he's the guy pretending to be Dr. Mabuse, using secret cameras hidden around to Luxor to spy on its guests and set up a master plan! -- or is he?This one may sound cheezy, but it's all in good fun and with tongue in cheeck, and a good final film for Lang.

You don't necessarily need to have seen Lang's earlier Mabuse films to be able to love this one. Like in his silent spy film 'Spione', Lang creates everything that would go on to be a genre cliche - but they all had to be original once. Here we have the stolen prototype weapon - a gun that fires needle shaped bullets that travel through glass and leave very little trace of assassination; and then there's the villain's car, with its revolving number-plates. Lang was certainly a few quick steps ahead of the makers of the Bond films, and certainly on a level with Hitchcock, Powell et al when it came to commenting on voyeurism.The plot's labyrinthine, of course, but it rattles along at such a pace and with such striking visuals that you hardly have time or the inclination to stop and worry - and it all comes clear at the end, with one or two fantastic revelations in addition to the few you expect.If one part doesn't quite please as much as you like, it's the context it fails to reference properly. Made at such a crucial time in History by a man who had seen so much, one only wishes it had more commentary to make. Lang's career swung like a pendulum between social commentary and serial escapades - if only he'd been able to pull the two together for his final film.