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New decade, old terrors, "und Tod." A familiar timbre in "a series of strange, unsolved crimes," outlandish yet crystalline, a steel needle to the brain between cars at a red light. "Does the name Dr. Mabuse mean anything to you?" The clairvoyant with silver mane and blank orbs (Wolfgang Preiss), the obnoxiously ebullient insurance agent with a yen for astrology (Werner Peters), just two of the shapeshifters crossing paths at the Luxor Hotel, a former Nazi haunt. Such "a negative aura" that the runaway socialite (Dawn Addams) is introduced trembling on the edge of the abyss, the Yankee industrialist (Peter van Eyck) helps her off the ledge and is readily entangled in her marital tribulations. Hypnosis, blackmail, disguises and resurrections, all "sehr interessant" to the skeptical police inspector (Gert Fröbe). Fritz Lang's dazzling schwanengesang, the supreme resolution of themes going as far back as the silent era. The criminal genius is really a state of mind, a malefic liquid mercury running from epoch to epoch, from Weimar Germany to the Cold War and beyond. Surveillance cameras like countless eyes figure in the analysis of vision and the cinéaste as wielder of power—a couple at a ballroom turns out to be an image on a monitor, the malefactor's control room is transparently a studio. Cosmic maps and Byzantine engravings on the walls of the séance chamber, the stomped bouquet of flowers and the bomb-rigged telephone, "like an American horror movie." The classic and the modern, as always braided by anxiety: A two-way mirror as a screen into the heroine's suite is concurrent with Peeping Tom, a quick change in the elevator evokes Feuillade. "Yesterday on a steed abreast, today a bullet in the chest." The nightmare dissolved, Lang leaves the characters (and cinema) in a fragile but hopeful embrace. With Andrea Checchi, Marielouise Nagel, Reinhard Kolldehoff, and Howard Vernon. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |