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Mabuse the gambler, the protean kingpin and "the state within the state," Mabuse the critic: "What is your attitude toward Expressionism, Doctor?" "A mere pastime, but then again, everything today is pastime." Germany between wars is a land of sensation-seekers and "modern cannibalism," split by Fritz Lang into labyrinthine blocks with proto-Syberberg subtitles ("A Portrait of the Age," "A Play About People of Our Time"). The criminal mastermind (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is a hollow husk with a controlling eye and a bottomless supply of disguises, elderly aristocrat and proletarian agitator flow equally from his makeup box. Nicknamed "The Great Unknown," he floods the country with counterfeit bills and stands above the undulating mass of top hats at the stock exchange. "Playing with people and their destinies" is his specialty, his latest obsession is the bored countess (Gertrude Welcker) helping his nemesis the inspector (Bernhard Goetzke). In a Weimar Republic of parallel and concealed worlds, one gets poisoned in the back of a cab and wakes up adrift in a rowboat. Opium-den languor and malefic mania are two sides of the same hypnotic coin, the rotating gambling table and the interlocked palms of the séance session, the discarded mistress (Aud Egede-Nissen) who is a Klimt beauty one moment and then Renfield in prison writhing for her Dracula. Visions, sets and even words come alive in Lang's epic, not even cinema itself escapes scrutiny—a manipulator of many fictions, the villain conjures up images that literally spill off the screen and into the audience. The lines of influence are many: Scarface (police shootout), The 39 Steps (clairvoyant on philharmonic stage), High and Low (stolen valise hurled off moving train). Herzog's Invincible finds the mesmerist as Hitler's Minister of the Occult. With Alfred Abel, Paul Richter, Robert Forster-Larrinaga, and Hans Adalbert-Schlettow. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |