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DR MABUSE, THE GAMBLER
(Dr Mabuse, Der Spieler)
Rating: 
Germany. 1922.
Director – Fritz Lang, Screenplay – Fritz Lang & Thea von Harbou, Based on the Novel by Norbert Jacques, Producer – Erich Pommer, Photography (b&w) – Carl Hoffmann, Production Design – Otto Hunte & Stahl-Ubache. Production Company – Ullstein-UCO Films/Ufa.
Cast:
Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Dr Mabuse), Bernhard Goetzke (District Attorney Wenk; English Version – Police Chief De Witt), Aud Egede Nissen (Carozza; English Version – Cara), Paul Richter (Eddie Hull), Gertrud Welcker (Countess Told; English Version – Countess Tolst), Alfred Abel (Richard Fleury)
Plot: The psychoanalyst Dr Mabuse is really a criminal mastermind. A master of disguise and hypnotism, Mabuse runs a vast criminal empire, manipulating stockmarkets and counterfeiting money, and is wanted by every police agency on the continent. In the Folies Bergere, Mabuse influences the mind of a weak-willed playboy into gambling away all of his fortune. But District Attorney Wenk is determined to stop Mabuse.
Dr Mabuse is one of the great epics of German silent cinema. Dr Mabuse’s influence is enormous – most obviously in its generation of a series of lesser sequels in the 1960s. More so than that though, Dr Mabuse is really the seed from which the James Bond super-villains were drawn, indeed one can still see Mabuse the calculating criminal genius still reflected in contemporary villains like Hannibal Lecter.
Director Fritz Lang had a great fascination with masses being controlled by Machiavellian minds – as in many of his American sound thrillers or with images like the artificial Maria turned rabble-rouser in Metropolis (1927). In Dr Mabuse, Lang taps into the decadence of post-War Europe with great accuracy – the Folies Bergere, the flourishing gambling clubs, the free-wheeling continental set, the world of international finance (a scene, cut from this version of the film, in which Mabuse manipulates a stock-market crash is amazingly prophetic of the German inflation crisis only a couple of years later), the Cubist movement, the flourishing of spiritualism. Some of Lang’s images of the bored rich are striking. One of the gambling dens advertises itself with the statement: “Hilarious enjoyment without restrictions. Our motto is ‘Whatever Gives Pleasure is Permissible.’” And the Countess is wont to stating title cards like: “We need adventure to make life worthwhile” and [of watching people gamble]: “I find thrills and sensations which help to make existence less dull.” In this milieu Mabuse is seen as the ultimate decadent – “Nothing is interesting in the long run – except one thing. Playing with human beings and human fates,” he states at one point, and at another: “There is no such thing as love. There is only desire – and the will to possess what you desire.”
As Mabuse, Rudolf Klein-Rogge (who was also Rotwang in Lang’s Metropolis) physically dominates the film with a ruthlessly brutal performance, strutting about with a glower of pure malevolence. Lang engages in some wonderful cinematic effects to demonstrate Mabuse’s mental powers at work – like a shot that looks up over a player’s cards to show Mabuse’s eyes glowing, which then closes in as everything else goes black until we see nothing except the eyes in the dark. Despite Rudolf Klein-Rogge dominating the film, Fritz Lang does a good job in the creation of his adversary Wenk, which Bernard Goetzke (Death in Lang’s Destiny [1921]) plays with a steely brilliance.
The sets created as background for the film are superb. A hotel foyer is dominated by a giant chandelier and beneath it a large circular carpet – the walls of the rest of the room fade into the distance so that there is a single set that almost entirely consists only of the chandelier and carpet with people seen as distant figures circling around it. Although the most fabulous set is the nightclub where the centerpiece is a large circular table with slides (for the patrons presumably to send their bets down) and a giant electrically-lit star-shaped chandelier that descends and opens its wings out to reveal a nude dancer.
The film seen here, Dr Mabuse, The Gambler, is but a pale shadow of the original film that Fritz Lang created. The original German version, which is still in existence today, hails in at four hours in length; this video version is under 90 minutes in length. This unfortunately is the English-language print that was released in the USA in 1924. It is not a particularly good translation – as witness the director being called Fritz Lange. This video version seems to be cut too – some sources list the English-language print as 90 minutes – however the video box lists both 82 and 86 minutes. This is certainly a poor release – the video cover describes the scene where Mabuse manipulates the stockmarket but such a scene does not appear in this version of the film. The characters, with the exception of Mabuse, have all been renamed – in the German version the character of Richard is the Countess’s husband, in this version he becomes her brother. What must be said in its favour though is that the story holds together surprisingly coherently. A fully restored version of the film was released by the Goethe Institute in 2004, which now runs at 297 minutes, nearly five hours in length.
The other Dr Mabuse film are:– The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933), The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960), The Return of Dr Mabuse/The FBI Versus Dr Mabuse (1961), The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1962), The Invisible Dr Mabuse/The Invisible Horror (1962), Dr Mabuse vs Scotland Yard (1964), The Death Ray of Dr Mabuse/The Secret of Dr Mabuse (1964). The first two of these sequels were directed by Fritz Lang. Dr Mabuse was modernized by Claude Chabrol as Dr M/Club Extinction (1990).
Fritz Lang’s other films of genre interest are:– Destiny (1921) wherein Death incarnates two lovers throughout various historical periods; the two-part Niebelungen saga, Siegfried (1922) and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924), based on the Teutonic myths; Metropolis (1927); Woman in the Moon (1929), a realist attempt to portary a Moon landing; M (1931), a thriller concerning the hunt for a child killer; The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933); the afterlife fantasy Liliom (1933); the film noir psychological thriller Secret Beyond the Door (1948); and a further Dr Mabuse sequel The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1994
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