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The opening is by itself a mini-masterpiece of pervasive, inexplicable menace: A pounding industrial roar envelops the disgraced agent (Karl Meixner) hiding indoors, outdoors he's nearly crushed by falling cement and a rolling barrel bursts into flames. (Darkness is pierced by pistol blasts, when next seen he's literally mad with fear.) Still "the man behind the curtain," Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) scribbles incessantly in his asylum cell, just a change of office. A jewel robbery is but the tip of a campaign of chaos, "Herrschaft des Verbrechens" is the goal. Fritz Lang's Berlin, where the cacophony of a traffic jam masks an assassin's bullet (cf. The Ipcress File). The villainous name is etched on glass and on psyches, the inspector (Otto Wernicke) can't quite place it, a sinister Weimar memory properly exacerbated. Franju emulates the visit to the mental institute in La Tête Contre les Murs, the professor (Oscar Beregi) fulsomely eulogizes the nefarious patient on the slab: "A phenomenal, superhuman mind that would have laid waste to our whole rotten world, which is long overdue for destruction." (The malevolent cerebellum comes to him in a hallucination, and the transference is complete.) Shootout in the apartment, metallic cutout and rigged Victrola, the tools of "a monstrous business." Hope lies with the young sweethearts (Gustav Diessl, Monique Rolland) locked in with a bomb, they prove their mettle by flooding the room to muffle the explosion. A characteristically concentrated construction along with an astonishing snapshot of the zeitgeist, every maniac gets his cult. "Mabuse the criminal?" "Mabuse the genius!" The car chase at night goes into 2001: A Space Odyssey, the professor's last view is Norman's in Psycho. The door slams shut but Lang knows the new evil is loose already. With Oskar Höcker, Theodor Loos, Rudolf Schündler, Theo Lingen, Hadrian Maria Netto, Camilla Spira, Georg John, and Klaus Poh. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |