Il testamento del dottor Mabuse

(This comment is on the fully restored Criterion edition.)

I see that my comments on the Mabuse films have been deleted. There was an IMDb era when any offended reader could exact revenge by successfully complaining of scores of comments. But I guess that's apt for the aura of this film, its history of being suppressed and its themes.

I find watching Lang movies to be frustrating. His most celebrated films: "Metropolis" and "M" don't resonate with me as they do with others. Even though they have effective scenes, they are effective not because they are cinematic, but because they are masterful stagecraft. After Lang went to Hollywood, claiming this to be anti-Hitler, his films turned mechanical.

It was only with this project that he hits my sweet spot, where his attentions are turned to all the elements of the cinematic art. This is whole, and innovative in every element. Others may find the many plots overloaded and in some cases turgid. But I think the density of story is essential to the elegant narrative tricks that this uses - all of them rooted in the film as film.

We have, possibly for the first time, non-linear narrative designed in a way to confuse the viewer so that we are inserted as detective, actively engaged in watching merely to make sense of what we see. The thing is envisioned as a whole with many reflections, many cycles, many connections between scenes and jumping among scenes. Images, sounds, ideas, characters contrast with and merge with each other. Its a tight fabric with so many junctions we can navigate as we wish, or as we have skills.

Yes, there are ordinary pleasures, too: amazing effects shots, one of the best chase scenes ever filmed, some very fine use of grime. But they re merely incidental to the way that this symphony is constructed and executed. This is one of the few films in my experience that gets bigger the more you learn about its provenance: the infidelities between the filmmaker and his screenwriter wife; the business with Hilter, much obfuscated by later Lang claims and the notion that he would do so. The original novel, The previous and subsequent Lang Mabuse films and their failings, indeed the breakage of his career. The many incarnations of this film on its way to us.

The way it overtly is written to influence, containing a story about writing that influences. The way it deceives on the screen, containing a story about deception behind a "screen."

The sex, as it penetrates the whole thing without ever being shown. The fact that although you can see it as having historical significance, you can still after 75 years see it as a modern, immediately effective experience from a man that for one year actually mattered. Still does.

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

Compared to most films in Hollywood in the 1930s, Fritz Lang's mystery thriller The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is years ahead of the game in terms of plot and camera techniques. There are some shots in this movie that would not be seen until Orson Welles' famous Citizen Kane, which forever changed the cinema. However, I think it's safe to say that Lang was doing the same thing in Germany at the time when Nazi rule was in the wake. In this complex and filling story, a veteran criminal with a brilliant mind has been in an insane asylum for ten years yet is writing memoirs that seem to predict crimes happening outside. The Inspector Lohmann attempts to solve this case, not knowing how strange and convoluted it really is. Despite the complexity of it, this film is rather easy to follow and boasts some great performances and use of sound. Considering this was only Lang's second film using sound, it is a wonder he did what he could with it. The movie opens with a noisy print shop and a man hiding behind a huge trunk. The loud and obnoxious noise of the printer continues all throughout the scene and shows what sound can really do to a film. All in all, Lang shows his pioneering ability to use the resources available in ways no one had thought of at the time. There are hints of German Expressionism here, but mostly just a well-told and engaging detective story that certainly will not age any time soon.

Lang's last film in Germany before he hurriedly left the country (the director claimed that he had lately been offered a key position in the Nazi-controlled film industry), The Testament Of Dr Mabuse (aka: Das Testament des Dr Mabuse) is best seen as a warning by a departing talent, as well as a continuation of many of the themes of the director's previous work. Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) had been a great success, and his new film, his second made in sound, capitalises on the reputation both of the earlier film and the grand social malevolence of its central character. Mabuse is another of Lang's evil, all-controlling masterminds - he was to reappear again in the director's last film, The 1,000 Eyes Of Dr Mabuse (1960) - the representation of whose hypnotic presence and malign influence was to find disfavour with the followers of Hitler. The Nazis gained power during the post-production period of the film and, while recognising the great director's talent; Testament was promptly banned by Goebbels who found the political portrait implicit in Mabuse too close to home. In later years Lang was to suggest that the film was intended as a political parable, although this might have been exaggerated.

As the present film opens, Inspector Lohmann (a splendidly grouchy Otto Wernicke) receives a message from a former criminal associate who has stumbled onto a massive criminal conspiracy. Before the details can be spelt out, the crook is hunted down and killed. Investigating his disappearance Lohmann discovers the name Mabuse scratched on a windowpane (a clue echoed in Lang's M, in which Lohmann also appears.) Mabuse is discovered in an asylum in the charge of Dr Baum (Oscar Beregi). The criminal genius, insane but with his remaining magnetic attraction intact, is feverishly writing detailed notes on prospective crimes. When Mabuse dies, a visiting Dr Kramm finds the brilliant criminal notes of Dr Mabuse on the floor, compares a news report of a jewellery robbery to what he is now reading and tells Baum that he is going to report it to the police. He is promptly killed by Mabuse's elite Section 2B hitmen on orders from the unseen leader - a scene set in traffic that found an echo over 30 years later in The Ipcress File (1965). Meanwhile a romance develops between Kent (Gustav Diessel), one of the henchmen of Mabuse's gang, still apparently controlled by remote control instructions, and the woman Lilly (Vera Liessem) who helped him when he was down and out. Mabuse's 'testament' thus lies in both the meticulously planned crimes, which make up his posthumous papers as well as his hypnotic and malign influence on those who are controlled by him.

Critics have compared the visual style of this film with those of others from the same period, notably Spione (aka: Spies, 1928), Lang's most recent comparable social thriller. Testament is far more cluttered, its visual confusion suggesting moral complexity as well as the closing in of threatening events - both as far as the characters are concerned and, as it unfortunately turned out, for German society in general. In M, evil was detected in the presence of a murderous outsider, one eventually brought to book by a benign conspiracy of the underworld. Here there is a web of criminal activity and corruption from which no one is entirely immune, and in which many are driven by a murderous compulsion to obey an evil power. At the same time, Lang is happy enough to introduce into this world of social corruption elements of thrills and suspense, which spring from a much simpler world of serials and adventure stories. The near documentary feel of a lot of the film is interspersed with explosions, floods, chases and close escapes. In this way the sombre, far reaching criminalities of Mabuse's schemes, rooted in current socio-political unrest are counter-pointed with time honoured pleasures brought by crime melodrama. Lang had a weakness for this sort of drama: The Spiders Part II: The Diamond Ship (1920) contains a somewhat similar but much shorter, scene, where the hero is also trapped in a water filling room from which he escapes. It has been noted just how much of the action of Testament plays out like a dream, and in this sense it anticipates the disorientating mood which would characterise much of noir cinema of a few years later - of which the newly Americanised Lang would be a major exponent. Certainly the arch criminal mastermind of Mabuse has something in common with such later characters as, say Mike Lagana in The Big Heat (1953) although such figures in Lang's American period are far less omniscient. Once Hitler was out of the way, Lang increasingly saw the manipulation of human life as the province of fate rather than men, a view that had made its first ongoing appearance as far back as Der Müde Tod (Destiny, 1923). In Testament, some indeed appear pre-doomed by a nemesis stalking them, although this is largely placed in the human realm. Events play out like an unstoppable nightmare - a feeling reinforced by Mabuse's somnambulistic appearance as he constructs evil from his bed, the presence of ghosts, the unreality of the mysterious drama which unfolds and such scenes as the weird opening, its surreal use of factory sound anticipating the dark sound-scapes of Eraserhead (1978). By the end of Lang's film there is a sense that all have been involved in some grand combine of evil, and that the disorder and social chaos it presages has only just been forestalled - not by justice, but madness.

Modern viewers coming to Lang's film will find much to enjoy, even if some of the incidental elements have necessarily become a little dated. The editing and camerawork are excellent, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge's piercingly intense Mabuse is a memorable creation. Lohmann and the supporting cast are memorable characters, although the romantic interest between Kent and Lilly looks a little faded after all these years. It's a film in which special effects go hand in hand with suspense and the staging is still impressive. Amongst the most memorable scenes are those are the end with the destruction of the chemical factory and the expressionistic car chase back to the asylum. Most importantly, while the morally debilitating effects of the post-war German depression as well as the impending rise of adulatory Nazism have now passed into history, Lang's dramatisation of cause and effect remains as electric as ever in one of the finest films of his early sound career.

This classic thriller is an allegory of the nazis early rise to power in Germany and their future intentions. Censored by the Nazis government and not seen in its full form until many years later. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse(1933) deals with the themes of free will, genius, madness, and power. The Dr. Mabuse character foreshadows the great James Bond villains of Dr. No, Goldfinger, and Ernest Blofeld. Would be the final film that director Fritz Lang would do in Germany for many years until 1960 for his final film, The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.

Fritz Lang's Das TESTAMENT des Dr.MABUSE is a mesmerising, master-crafted entertainment which no serious movie freak will have missed. The largely forgotten, parallel French version, filmed simultaneously with a French speaking cast, is like most of these foreign versions, a poor relation. I'm glad I saw the German one first - twice in a week as it happens.

Shorter than the German film, it truncates the lovers subplot and plays it with colourless juveniles, omits the giant eye make up shots of Klein Rogge, which re-call Dr. Baum's art collection and, worse, attempts to up the pace by chopping off the fade out scene transitions - giving correctly, the impression that there is something missing.

The German cast is uniformly superior, with the possible exception of the jolly, frankfurter-cooking henchman, who does manage to make an impression. Jim Gerald was a comedian - effectively so in CHAPEAU de PAILEE d'ITALIE and FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS - and he lacks the monolith menace that Wernike provides. Thommy Bordelle is normally an unimposing performer and, giving it his best shot, he's still no fair swap for the the great Oscar Beregei, in the one circulating film where we get to hear Beregei's voice. The French Dr. Kramm (who is he?), in particular, is out classed by Theodore Loos (the secretary from METROPOLIS among other stand-out performances).

Well it's still Lang's Mabuse film and remains intermittently effective - Hoffmeister's vision of Lohman's entry into his see through cell is still a grabber - and it is another piece of the jig saw and another, if minor, Lang movie. So nice to get to see it after all these years.