Product Description
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A truly legendary silent film, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler
had a major impact on the development of the crime thriller,
building upon the work of the pioneering French film serialist
Louis Feuillade (Les Vampires) and firmly establishing it as a
significant film genre. This epic two-part tale was originally
released as two separate films, respectively subtitled the Great
Gambler and Inferno, and that format is reproduced here. The plot
revolves around the pursuit of arch fiend Dr. Mabuse, a gambler,
hypnotist, master of disguises and all-around criminal
mastermind. Mabuse was the prototype for the sort of evil genius
super-villains that would later become common in movies, whether
it be in the James Bond pictures or in comic book adaptations
like Superman and Batman. The film is dominated by the presence
of Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Mabuse. A top German actor of the silent
era, he is best known today for his performance as the mad
scientist Rotwang in Lang's Metropolis.
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It's hard to imagine that the razor-sharp Kino DVD of
Fritz Lang's first magnum opus fails to capture any of the visual
electricity and heady atmosphere experienced by Berlin filmgoers
in 1922. The film's historical importance to the crime-film genre
and its thematic relevance to the director's later work have
never been in dispute, but with only murky, choppy editions to go
by, the movie has largely been paid lip service for its legacy
rather than appreciated for itself. Now, thanks to this
definitive restoration by the Murnau Institute, we can properly
see it and experience it.
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is actually two films in one--or, more
precisely, one film in two feature-length parts totaling
four-and-a-half hours and conceived to be watched on consecutive
evenings. Its title character is a criminal mastermind with the
power and the will to orchestrate complex capers, counterfeit
national currencies, manipulate the stock market, and
hypnotically bend anyone to play a role in his diabolical
designs. The hand of Mabuse seems to reach everywhere--for the
excellent reason that the Doctor himself, a master of disguise,
turns out to be just about anywhere at just the moment his
intervention will wreak havoc and wreck lives. (He's played by
Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who would repeat the part ten years later in
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and also, in spirit if not in name,
in Lang's dazzling 1928 film Spies; he was also the inventor
Rotwang in Metropolis--as well as, offscreen, the former husband
of Lang's screenwriter wife Thea von Harbou!)
The film's title in German is Doktor Mabuse der Spieler, and our
supervillain is really less a gambler (all his games of chance
are rigged) than a player: playing multiple roles, but even more
importantly, playing with others' lives, playing with the very
fabric of modern reality. The subtitles of the two parts are "A
Picture of the Time" and "People of the Time"; the film is an
artifact of the Weimar era when, as one character remarks, "We
are bored and tired ... we need sensations of a very special kind
to remain alive." Lang and his art directors, Otto Hunte and Karl
Stahl-Urach, create a hallucinatory mise-en-scène in which the
decor is at once stark and decadent, a playground for all manner
of perverse spectacle and gamesmanship, a maze of corridors and
doorways and streets where the modern and the gothic interlayer.
This world ripe for Mabusian manipulation prefigured Hitler by a
decade--and in one of his last declarations, the Doctor
anticipates more contemporary visionaries of chaos: "I feel as a
state within a state, with which I have always been at war."
Fritz Lang continues to be a chillingly prophetic filmmaker.
--Richard T. Jameson