What it is, is a slam-bang mystery/action movie that gets off to a sluggish start and winds up in a spasm of explosions and pursuits. Not a masterpiece, it still excels for its time in special effects and the visual imagery, not to mention the good doctor's moral nihilism.It's Dr. Mabuse's "testimony" because he dies in an insane asylum near the movie's beginning. However, the guy is a genius and through some sort of posthumous hypnosis or teleportation or transmogrification he manages to infect the mind and soul of the asylum's chief. The chief then carries out Mabuse's plan. It's a simple plan. He's going to destroy the earth because everything is too corrupt to continue its existence. He could be running for president in 2016l.It is a bit slow at the beginning. It's shot as a silent movie with exaggerated expressions and gestures used as a substitute for dialog. Once it achieves flight speed it turns into an interesting mystery with some exciting scenes. Especially memorable is an hallucinatory car chase along an infinitely long highway through overarching trees that are illuminated only by headlights.The only truly noticeable performance is by Otto Wernicke as Inspector Lohmann, the police detective investigating the mysterious murders. His character is coarse and unlikable but he brings life to the role, whereas the others are more or less doing their jobs. There's an innocent young woman involved, Wera Liessem, who lacks whatever "sex appeal" means. A bit player, Ludwig Stössel, went on to a reasonably successful career as a character actor in Hollywood.It's been claimed, by Lang among others, that this was a propagandistic tract aimed at Naziism. It was released the year Hitler came to power. But who knows what went on in anyone's mind in Germany of that era? The country had just suffered a major bout of hyperinflation. The mark-dollar exchange rate rose from 4.2 to one in 1914 to a peak of around 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar by November 1923. At its height, prices were rising so fast that waiters had to climb on tables to call out new menu prices in restaurants every half hour. And the economy was still in the grip of a severe depression. Hitler hadn't yet turned into Mabuse.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is something that one might not expect in the catalog of work by the towering figure in German cinema, Fritz Lang. The film is, actually, a sequel. Or, correctly, the second part of what is in retrospect a trilogy (it ended with 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, which ended up being the director's final film). It concerns the title character, who in the first film - arguably the first 'crime epic' as at four and a half hours - chronicles in expert detail how a madman takes over a German city with his hypnotic powers of criminal influence.That film as well as this sound-era follow-up, the latter of which got banned by Goebbles for supposed influence on the public (and no wonder with its 'Mystery Voice' of influence, but more on that in a minute), are not exactly "high art." On the contrary, I think Lang would readily admit these are popular works of art, inspired initially by a pulp serial. Indeed watching this film in particular I can't help but think with its swath of criminals under a madman's "testament" and spell (particularly after his demise) and police force inching closer and closer to discovering the secrets of this man's plan, that all it's really missing is Batman. Matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me a bit to discover that, one way or another, Bob Kane or Bill Finger didn't watch this (or the original bad-ass 1922 epic feature) to inspire Gotham just a bit.In this world, people are desperate. It's hard not to see it as Lang shows a flashback of one of the employment-desperate criminals, who has one little spot of hope with a woman who loves him practically unconditionally (or maybe she's one of those 'I can change this Bad Boy' types, but I digress). These were tough times, and people might just decide to turn to crime as those jobs weren't available - or, as Goebbles might have picked up on, the desperation of the German people to Follow The Leader so to speak. For most of the film we don't know who is this Man Behind the Curtain (literally!) who delivers orders and demands to the criminals that they must carry out; mostly, it seems, involving a jewel heist worth hundreds of thousands.It's curious that Lang casts/repeats the same character and actor from *M*, not the original Dr. Mabuse silent film, Captain Lohmann, for this film. Perhaps it's a crossbreed then of sequels, which is rare for any director to attempt: the same man who caught that child killer played so notoriously/well by Peter Lorre would return to find out this "Testament" era of Dr. Mabuse. We only see a little of Mabuse anyway... in *living form* that is. He scribbles notes and delivers them from his room, somehow. Of course I wouldn't dare reveal too much - yes, even for a film that is over eighty years old - but how it is actually getting out to the criminal elements are devilishly clever, if maybe, just a little, obvious.But Lang is dealing in clichés here and having so much fun doing it. And his filmmaking is one of two modes and always so pleasurable to watch: either he's patient, waiting with his shots as the silent film master that he was, taking in actors' movements, usually when they talk right at the camera/the audience, OR he exercises his action-film chops with plenty of energy, particularly in the first act when we see a man who becomes surrounded by some of Mabuse's "minions" (which may involve a barrel full of explosives), and then in the climax which involves a chase and a man driving a car in a complete daze. Lang takes his time with his pulp, and milks moments for all they are worth. Of course watching bits like the one criminal and his girlfriend Lillie is a little dated (just how, you know, unconditional she is in her love), but you can take that with a grain of salt hopefully.What's so striking here is how Lang gets this cops vs criminals thing down so well; he did it before in the first segment, and one wonders going in if there will be enough time to develop all of this. But this time it works so ingeniously because it's the crazy aftermath of Dr. Mabuse's reign (spoiler: he dies halfway through the film). So that his influence is practically supernatural, as he appears to characters as a crazy apparition, with eyes bugging out and a a face in crazier contours. It's this kind of scene that just by itself will make your hair rise. In the rest of the story... it makes sense, sort of. The acting matches the intensity of the action, and makes for a helluva potboiler. This is a filmmaker making a point about the terror and horrors of crime - and, of course, what a simple voice can do for easily impressionable people in dire straits - while having a lot of fun, in his own diabolical way. It dwells in the darkness of the human soul...Again, like Batman.

A new crime wave grips the city and all clues seem to lead to the nefarious Dr. Mabuse, even though he has been imprisoned in a mental asylum for nearly a decade.Interestingly, the film is a sequel to both "Mabuse the Gambler" and "M". The "M" connection may only be implied, but there are enough references to think they must exist in the same world. (And some stylistic choices draw a line, too, such as both Lohmann and M's killer identified by their whistling.) The film marked the end of Lang's collaboration with his wife, Thea von Harbou (and the end of their marriage). This was his second film with producer Seymour Nebenzal (the first was "M"). Nebenzal is not as well known as the directors he financed, but maybe he should be: Lang, Pabst, Sirk and more...The Criterion disc is loaded with special features, not least of which is commentary from film historian David Kalat. Strongly recommended for anyone who has a love of film. I do not think they have transferred it to Blu-Ray yet, but I find it hard to believe they could improve on what they have already done...

I rate the silent Mabuse from '22 as one of the most important films we have, in hindsight one of the most influential as well. It laid all the groundwork for film noir, the visible space of the story as the stage of some chaotic spiel manipulated from above and the players who act it out tied with strings to where the manipulation is taking place.The notion is largely the same in this sound incarnation; the criminal mastermind who under various guises controls the world we experience as the narrative of the film, and our frustrated attempts to apprehend him. But it fails in one important aspect. In that first Mabuse, we could see from both sides of the mirror, both the manipulator and the world he held on strings. In one fantastic scene taking place in what looked like a movie theater, and so referencing the movie illusion we were seeing from our position as viewers, these two perspectives aligned even. Here Mabuse is obscured by another remove, the various gangs who do his bidding around town.So instead of spending time with the illusionist, we follow common crooks. A man led astray, but who is basically good and saved by love. The inspector and his cronies as they try to disentangle the thread. It's like M all over again, for the most part a crime movie as a clockwork game of checkers between different groups of people that fight to be in the right place first.But it's successful, to the degree that it is, for the same reason. No, it's nothing to do with the cinematic. Lang was talented with hard allusions - there's a famous scene at a crossroads here - but otherwise simply hard with actors and camera. It's exactly that Mabuse is transferred out of sight that provides the extra layer, or at best that he flickers like some spectral emanation.What film noir did with these films when it finally reached America, is that it transferred Mabuse out of sight so that our focus was guided to the chaotic world below, where easy money beckoned, but which was now felt - no longer seen - as being controlled from somewhere. Here we can actually see the very process, how Mabuse is transmuted from a human being to a force that pervades everywhere and anxiety dissolves in the air itself.Two images are astounding in this sense, and however clunky the middle part about cops and crooks you should ultimately see this because of these two.One is the place where the henchmen receive their orders, a voice and a shadow addressing them from behind a curtain, and so a mysterious presence, a force, an emanation from a higher level, but no longer a person you can identify or put behind bars. And if we peel the curtain, we get what? But of course the cinematic illusion.The other is one of the few instances we actually see Mabuse. Locked inside the mental asylum, he's writing from his bed what is essentially the plot of the movie we see, heist movie stuff. We see him perched on the bed, taut, motionless, eyes fixed nowhere, as though withdrawn in malevolent meditation. His masterplan is to send the world wheeling into mindless chaos, destruction, finally the ashes from which it can be reborn. Lang couldn't have grasped the full implications of this, this was after all the part that was supposedly meant to reflect the contemporary insidious evils of Hitler, but this particular Mabuse, no longer a simple criminal mind as in the first film, not merely content to contort reality for the sake of money or a woman but with ultimately reassembling it as his highest aim, and so a cosmic Mabuse, is what in Eastern philosophy was rendered as the universal destroyer aspect of Shiva.Mabuse is interpreted for us as evil, because what he represents - here the dissolution of order - we understand as terrifying, have to. Likewise images of Shiva in his incarnation as Bhairava, the destroyer, are always meant to strike fear. The ghastly eyes of Mabuse immortalized in movie posters is that graven image. But that is, of course, only one aspect of him. It's the same Shiva that creates the world all over again. Mabuse by comparison is the corrupted human who would like to play god, he has mastered the mind but is none the wiser.