(Flash Review)Many people give me a crinkled face when I mentioned to them that I watched a four hour silent German film. Even after I say, "but it's a Fritz Lang film.", the crinkle turns to a blank stare. For a 4 hour silent film, it does a solid job of holding my attention. I discovered this film after first watching Dr. Mabuse in the 1933 film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. That was pretty interesting so I had to give it a go. When the 2 disks came in the mail, I figured I got a bonus features disk and only then did I realize that the film's true duration need 2 disks to contain it all. In The Gambler, Mabuse is a man with a thirst for mass wealth. He finds some very illegal and unusual ways to extract money from wealthy people, which play out in riveting scenes that are complimented by an effective music score. In addition to managing his illegal methods, Mabuse also has to be elusive as the police commissioner is focused on uncovering his schemes. There are stylized comparisons with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with expressionistic designed sets while much of the movie takes place where the wealthy people frequent. See what clever methods Mabuse employs and will he be able to outsmart the police commissioner? Worth the time for those who choose to invest.

From director Fritz Lang (Metropolis), this silent film was featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, and despite it being nearly five hours long I was determined to watch the whole thing. Basically an organisation of criminals led by mad professor Dr. Mabuse (Metropolis's Rudolf Klein-Rogge) are nearing the completion of a big scheme for the big big plan to take over the world, the crook will be able to make huge profits in the stock exchange stealing valuable information. Later the master criminal is also a master of disguise, and turns himself into a stage illusionist, hypnotist and mind reader (imagine an early Derren Brown), and along the way many people are murdered to get his own way. In cahoots with him, passing information about the plan to kill young millionaire Edgar Hull (Paul Richter), is the stage show's main attraction Cara Carozza (Aud Egede Nissen). Obviously the meaning behind the title is that Dr. Mabuse is also a keen gambler, and he tries to psychically manipulate Hull in a card game, which he loses. Soon police investigation into the mysterious crime spree begins, with Commissioner Staatsanwalt Von Welk (Bernhard Goetzke) leading the enquiries, with hardly any leads or accurate information at all, so he needs assistance and sources. In the end, after so many stories within the story, cons, crime and much more Dr. Mabuse is eventually caught in the end and arrested after suffering some kind of breakdown. Also starring Alfred Abel as Graf Told, Gertrude Welcker as Gräfin Dusy Told, Hans Adalbert Schlettow as Georg the Chauffeur and Georg John as Pesch. This is apparently a famous anti-totalitarianism allegory, I would have no idea what that means, I obviously found it too long and complicated at times, crossing to other things going on, and having to read all the dialogue, but there were certainly some memorable visuals, such as the stage show, and ghostly figures walking around, and when I could keep up it was an entertaining enough silent crime thriller. Very good!

It is interesting to discover or rediscover Fritz Lang. He was well known for one film, Metropolis, and then for a few American films, films he shot in the USA. But the full set of Dr Mabuse's films is fascinating in a way because it provides a rare vision on the German cinema from the early 1920s to 1960. The eye looking at the world from a German point of view that spans over Hitler, Nazism and the Second World War is Fritz Lang's. We know him for his highly symbolical Metropolis in which the meaning is built by visual and numerical symbols. In this Dr Mabuse it is different. There are quite a lot of symbols but inherited from the silent cinema of the old days, symbols that are there only to make clear a situation that had been depicted previously with pictures and no words, or a page of intertitles. Fritz Lang still uses that technique in his 1960 film, which is a long time overdue for a silent cinema technique. But that is a style, nothing but a way of speaking, not a meaning. The meaning is absolutely bizarre. Dr Mabuse is a highly criminal person but his objective is not to commit crimes in order to get richer or whatever. It is to control the world through his criminal activity. The world is seen as basically negative, leading to chaos and overexploitation, leading to anarchistic crime and nothing else because the only objective of this modern world is to make a profit by all means available. Dr Mabuse is a master mind of his time and for him crime is the only way to destroy that capitalistic world that he never calls capitalistic or Kapitalismus and to replace it with pure chaos that should be able to bring a regeneration, a rejuvenating epiphany, a re-founding experience. We find in his mind what we could find in some of the most important criminal minds in this world, like Carlos in France, or Charles Manson in the USA, or those sects that practice mass suicide in order to liberate the suicidees and to warn the world about the coming apocalypse. It is the mind and thinking of those who practice war as a revolutionary activity with a fundamentalist vision of their religions or politics and the world that is supposed to reflect that religion. They do not want to build a different society and when they are in power they are constantly aiming at antagonizing their own population and the world because they cannot exist if they do not feel some opposition that they can negate, bring down, crush, like in Iran, or in Germany with Hitler, though later on it was not much different under the Communists in East Germany. These visions need opposition to exist and they provoke that opposition by aiming at taking the control of the world with violence and imposing their control with more violence. That's Dr Mabuse, the main brain of a criminal decomposition and re-composition of society on an absolutely antagonistic vision of life. But that vision is very common. Just as common as this phrase "a half full glass is nothing but a half empty glass". Add antagonism to that dual vision and then you have a struggle to the death between the half empty glass that wants to be full and the half full glass that wants to be empty (or full?), one half only wanting to take what the other half has and impose his half to the other half to make the world one by the elimination of the other side of the coin. That dual antagonistic vision is the popular and shrivelled up approach of the communist catechism of Stalin, inherited from Marx's French son in law Paul Lafargue, or of course in all dictatorship that reduces life to a little red book, to one hundred quotations from the master thinker of the revolution. That's the world you feel in these films. Fritz Lang embodies this ideology of the mentally poor in that criminal character of his: kill, rob, steal, counterfeit. Even if you die when doing so, the world will change and remember. The master criminal has to die in his activity in order to regenerate the world. What Fritz Lang introduced in his double main feature of the early 1920s and in his Testament, is that the master brain of this vision internalizes this paranoid and psychotic vision of the world into himself and has to become psychotic himself and it is in his psychosis that he finds the energy to conquer the world again. In the third film, Dr Mabuse has been dead for a long time and is reincarnated by someone who finds his inspiration in the doctor. That is a far-fetched cinematographic and fictional antic that is necessary as a reference but brings nothing to the vision itself. A few years later that ideology was to conquer our imagination in many ways. First the Berlin Wall became the symbol of that vision the way it was carried and conveyed to the world by the East-German communists. Then we have to think of the various revolutionary movements like Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, Die Rote Armee Fraktion, to take some German examples. But think of the French Mesrine and the Italian revolutionary urban guerrilla warfare movements and you will have a fair picture of this psychotic criminal mind copied and pasted into the political field. The Maoist Red Guard and Cultural Revolution movement was quite typical of this approach. All that was going to come in 1960 and we must admit Fritz Lang was seeing ahead of his time, just as he had seen Hitler in his Testament of Dr Mabuse: a political leader based on hypnosis and mesmerizing people into blindly following a band of criminals.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

Dr. Mabuse has to be the best-written and most harrowing villain ever created in the 20th century, and it's pretty amazing that he came so early. Fritz Lang's four-hour action-adventure mystery silent film is anything but an epic, and also is so good it doesn't even feel epic. Instead, for once, a four hour movie has been created where every scene and every moment has character development and meaning.It's no wonder this film comes from post-war, pre-Nazi Germany. It's filled with anxiety and angst about the times... and indeed says, in many different places, "of the times." It is a work of public psychology that revels in the fear of hegemonic control, structures itself around what is perceived to be a downward spiral, and fills the screen with every reminder of the decay. Indeed, the villainous Dr. Mabuse does not only inhabit physically most of the screen time (are you sure he's not there? Look again), but his nefarious presence seems felt in even the most remote circumstance within the narrative.Dr. Mabuse is not the only character, however. This film is filled with such good character development I don't think anything matches it up until Seven Samurai. There's Mr. Hull, the playboy victim of Mabuse who manages, in his short time in the narrative, to develop extreme sympathy for him before he dies. There's Ms. Carozza, the woman who falls for Mabuse so hard that she manages to subvert her own love for him through her own piety to him. And there's my favorite character of all, the Duchess, who's quixotic and energetic presence not only lights up the screen with splendor but also captures the affections of the silent era's greatest villain.But you want to know something cool? Not only is this movie a veritable work of character-constructed art, it also has explosions, gun battles, intrigue, gambling, and sex! You can have your art and entertainment too! I can see why Fritz Lang returned to these characters over and over again. Not only are they fascinating in their own right, but they inhabit a world darkly appealing in its excesses and shadow play. This movie, despite its strong connection to "the times", is as much a work of consummate fantasy.--PolarisDiB