The
title card for “Dr. Mabuse the Gambler,” the German director Fritz
Lang’s 4½-hour silent so-called “super-film,” promises “a portrait of
our time.” That time was 1922. Yet Lang’s tale of financial panic,
profiteering and doomsday revelry speaks to our own.
“Mabuse,”
which was originally shown in two parts but may be streamed as one
uncut film online, was greeted by its initial German audiences as akin
to a news bulletin. One Berlin paper speculated that a century hence,
the movie “will show people a time that they could perhaps scarcely
comprehend,” a time that saw “the extravagance of the newly rich, the
rapid gambling on the stock exchange, the clubs, the addiction to
pleasure, the speculation, the vast amount of smuggling, counterfeiting”
and more.
Stream “Dr. Mabuse the Gambler” on the Criterion Channel or Kanopy.
Adapted
from a popular novel by the journalist Norbert Jacques, “Mabuse” was a
lightning bolt that crackled across the stormy sky of Weimar Germany — a
newly established, shellshocked democracy where two abortive
revolutions followed the loss of World War I, hyperinflation was
mounting and social unrest was ubiquitous.
In
his later years, Lang would maintain that “Mabuse” originally started
with a rapid-fire montage (since lost) that juxtaposed scenes from the left-wing Spartacist uprising led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, the right-wing Kapp Putsch
that enlisted nationalist military leaders and the assassination of the
German foreign minister, Walther Rathenau. This seems unlikely since
Rathenau was shot two months after “Mabuse” opened, but the intro was
unnecessary. “Mabuse” merged with its moment and even prophesied what
was to come.
Paranoia
rules. A habitué of decadent Art Deco nightclubs, Mabuse (Rudolf
Klein-Rogge, who would play the mad scientist Rotwang in Lang’s “Metropolis”)
preys upon his wealthy victims. Not just a criminal mastermind but a
psychoanalyst to boot, Mabuse has multiple ways to cloud the mind. In
one newly relevant sequence, he tricks an unfortunate fall guy into
self-quarantine and, having destroyed his tenuous grasp on reality,
induces him to commit suicide.
Mabuse
is introduced shuffling a deck of cards showing his various disguises. A
more accurate translation of the title would be “Dr. Mabuse the
Player,” for this protean villain is also an actor. “Who is Behind All
This?” an intertitle demands. Mabuse is both ubiquitous and unknown. In
his classic film history, “From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological
History of the German Film,” the German critic Siegfried Kracauer
characterized Mabuse as “everywhere present but nowhere recognizable.”
(Or, as President Trump described Covid-19, “an invisible enemy” that
“came out of nowhere.”)
The
movie’s first chapter concerns an elaborate scheme, directed by Mabuse
from his study, whereby a secret “trade pact” is stolen from the
suitcase of a diplomat traveling by train. News of the theft, as well as
the document itself, is used to crash the commodity exchange, much to
Mabuse’s profit.
While
economic chaos is inherent in Mabuse’s intrigues (he also operates a
counterfeit money ring, staffed with blind slaves who cannot identify
him), looting the rich seems to be his preferred pastime while, thanks
to his hypnotic gaze and mental powers, world domination is his ultimate
goal. A behind-the-scenes manipulator whose many disguises include that
of a stage mesmerist,
a proletarian rabble-rouser, and a Jewish peddler, he is aided by a
gang of accomplices that include his cocaine-addled manservant and a
saucy dancer, Cara Carozza (the Norwegian actress Aud Egede-Nissen), a
star of the Folies Bergère.
These
minions are in Mabuse’s thrall, despite the abuse they suffer at his
hands. The movie is steeped in individual as well as social pathology.
In addition to practicing hypnotic mind control, Mabuse inspires the
sort of unquestioning, zombielike obedience (known in German as
kadavergehorsam) that, a decade later, Hitler would demand from his SS
and indeed all Germans. Carozza, whom Mabuse uses as a honey-trap,
insists that he is “the greatest man alive” even after his erotic
interest has been piqued by a sultry thrill-seeking countess (Gertrude
Welcker).
At
once wanton and repressed, the countess is a terrific character,
haunting the same casinos as Mabuse but never gambling because, as she
explains, she prefers to watch. Her luckless husband (Alfred Abel, who
plays Joh Frederson in “Metropolis”) is another sort of aesthete — a
collector whose mansion is overstocked with mock Cubist canvases and
faux African sculptures. (The cluttered parlor offers a preview of the
infamous Nazi exhibition of so-called degenerate art.)
The countess also casts her indolent spell on the resolute state
prosecutor Norbert von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke), who doggedly pursues
Mabuse until he is hypnotized by the master to drive a speeding death
car.
It
has been suggested that as a conjurer of mental images, Mabuse was a
sort of alter ego for the domineering director. Lang spared no expense.
“Mabuse” was shot in a studio vast enough to accommodate city streets
and even neighborhoods. The swanky nightclubs are set pieces in
themselves. One sequence juxtaposes a spiritualist soiree in a luxurious
apartment with the opening of the Petit Casino, a cabaret promising
“all that pleases is allowed.” Mabuse operates in both places
simultaneously.
The Petit Casino features a shimmy by the notorious “naked dancer” Anita Berber,
here wearing a tuxedo. (According to some accounts, she arrived late on
the set and out-diva’d Lang.) The Petit Casino also provides the arena
for Cara Carozza to lead on the most hapless of Mabuse’s victims, while
he himself infiltrates the séance to hypnotize the countess into
inviting him for dinner.
With
a dozen chapters, “Mabuse” lends itself to both incremental and binge
watching. Exerting its own form of mind control, it starts slowly and,
abetted by an edgy modernist score, builds in intensity to a mad climax.
The violent denouement anticipates by a decade the grand finale of
Howard Hawks’s “Scarface.” We have long since become inured to onscreen
mayhem, but original reviews suggest that early audiences were stunned
by the movie’s pace. “Speed, horrifying speed characterizes the film,”
one critic wrote. Applause broke out during a scene of cars racing
through the nocturnal streets of a studio-built Berlin.
“Mabuse”
entered German popular culture and, over the course of his career, Lang
was inspired to make several sequels. His second sound film, “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” (available to stream on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy)
was in postproduction when Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Now
confined to a mental hospital, the spectral Mabuse (again Klein-Rogge)
uses mental telepathy and a form of radio to incite a crime wave. Lang
left Nazi Germany before the film was banned. “Life under a terror
regime could not be rendered more impressively,” Kracauer wrote. It was
not shown publicly in Germany until 1951.
In the late 1950s, Lang returned to Germany to make several films including his swan song, “The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse” (rentable from Amazon Prime).
No less than its predecessors, this Cold War “Mabuse” is a trove of
prophetic paranoia with intimations of James Bond and “Dr. Strangelove.”
It was sufficiently popular in Germany to inspire six sequels. You can
imagine an internet version made today.
