Ian (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.

chaos-rampant I really urge you to watch this, but watch beyond the caper, watch the character beyond the simply nefarious evil mastermind that he appears as, and you'll be stunned with the the complexity of forces at work; at the center is a man who - having mastered the mind - can guide vision into shaping worlds and, from the inverse point-of-view of the unwitting victims, the shaped world as the stage of some indecipherable, chaotic spiel.So what this really is, is the precursor of film noir. The genre as later assumed by American hands - once Germans fled there - transferred Mabuse out of sight, but the fundamental movement remains: we had to assume the notion that somewhere, on a cosmic station above, the images that down here formed reality were being controlled and manipulated. What the protagonists in these films experienced as a world of fertile, opportunous chaos, and would therefore exploit to their own advantage, was eventually revealed to be a chimera of the mind led astray; the world was being supervised and kept in ledgers all along.This is pretty amazing stuff to have then; we can see the manipulator inside the manipulated world, and the motions that bring consequences on both ends of the illusion. The first scene shows Mabuse dealing cards with on them the faces of the players, the actors who are about to perform in the orchestrated fiction - Mabuse's inside the film, and also Lang's film about Mabuse. And there is a woman who is our surrogate viewer in all this; she watches the gamblers from a distance, searching faces for thrills and sensations. All this touches at the heart of self-referential cinema in ways that still astound by how erudite, how in-sightful. Viewers who are looking for films about the mind weaving films will be delighted. There is one scene that will be absolutely unequaled in film until the second great cinema of Resnais and Tarkovsky some forty years later. It shows Mabuse operating an illusion on stage before a packed theater; the entire audience watches transfixed at people magically walking out of a screen into the middle of the auditorium - and vanishing at a snap of the fingers - none of them realizing the confrontation that is actually playing out within the fantasy.But there is an extra layer that further elevates this. So what is perceived by the players as unluck or the chance turn of a card, from our double perspective rooted in Mabuse's mind is revealed as part of the same, decisive plan. Yet Mabuse is not a godlike presence, he is steeped in human passions; icy but on occasion petulant, seething, lusting, the mask full of emotional cracks.So, on one level we have a controlled reality as a puppet show of absurdities, but on the other end finally we get a glimpse of the mind cracking under the weight of what it must control, under the burden of the operated illusion. The final vision is a nightmare where these controlled images animate themselves against their tyrant. Tellingly it happens in a locked room; the blind people that were tasked by Mabuse to deal with his fortunes, in fact his counterfeit fortunes, now transform into apparitions of guilt.Few films have so deeply influenced our cinematic vision, from Vertigo to Lynch. It has been since disguised and embellished, but it's revealed here for the first time.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU 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

HulotderSpeiler This film has a plot that is so detailed, so developed, and so complex, that no one would believe it was a silent film. As the plot develops, the character of Dr. Mabuse changes drastically. In Part I, he is an impossibly clever and cunning criminal. He is introduced as a master of disguise who carries out an almost victimless crime with the stock markets. He is not evil, he is just a criminal. But then, you see him hypnotize a rich man in to gambling away large sums of money, abusing his skill as a psychoanalyst, and aiming to ruin and drive insane an innocent man. When state prosecutor von Wenk is introduced, you get the impression that you do not know what Mabuse is capable of.Later, in the film's most memorable scene, the state prosecutor, in disguise, enters a club and goes straight to the card table. There is Dr. Mabuse, in the disguise of a feeble old man. As the state prosecutor takes up his cards, the words TSI-NAN-FU begin to chase him. He is falling under the spell of Dr. Mabuse, and you see the grim determination in the eyes of Mabuse, and you see that he will stop at nothing to rob and kill the state prosecutor. This is the first time that you see true evil in Mabuse.After that, Mabuse seems troubled. He lives by the bottle, and is stern with his accomplices. He shows no mercy to Edgar Hull, the rich man he robbed, and lures him in to a deathtrap with the seductress Carrozza, who is caught. Although Mabuse could easily have gotten her out of prison, he does not bother, he instead, unveiling all his evil, kidnaps Countess Told, and locks her in the room where Carroza lived, showing that he is not going to rescue her, despite her love and claims that he is the greatest man in the world for him.And so Part II begins, with several evil goings on, all the fault of Dr. Mabuse. The Countess will not love Mabuse, Mabuse is slowly driving the Count insane, and Carrozza is still in prison, refusing to reveal to the state prosecutor that Dr. Mabuse is the "Mystery Man" they're looking for. Mabuse does not wish to free Carrozza, he wishes to kill the state prosecutor. He hypnotizes the Count, and commands him to kill himself, and the Count's butler tells the state prosecutor that the Count's treatment only became poor when Dr. Mabuse was visiting. This throws suspicion on Dr. Mabuse for the first time. He handles it gracefully, he blames a hypnotist (him in disguise) who is holding a show that night. This lures the State prosecutor to come to the show, where Mabuse picks people out of the crowd, and convinces them to do random things. Then he takes the State Prosecutor on stage, and puts him in a trance, just before he slips into the trance, he identifies Dr. Mabuse. Mabuse hypnotizes van Wenk to drive off a cliff, but he is saved at the last minute and brings police over to arrest Mabuse. Mabuse and his men stay and fight, but are overpowered, and Dr. Mabuse is forced to flee through an underground passage to his other base, where he counterfeits money. And finds himself unable to get out. He goes insane, and is apprehended. Poetic justice, we have now lost all sympathy for this demented man.Such is a detailed plot that is too sophisticated to be told properly through title cards, and it may require several viewings to understand certain parts. On other elements of film craft than story, first is photography. This is a film with excellent angles and distances, and even a few tracking shots. As well, the use of double exposures and the iris shot show things that can best be expressed through visuals, such as the double exposure showing the face of Mabuse over the stock market.Rudolf Klein-Rogge gives one of the best performances in all of silent film as the demented arch-criminal Dr. Mabuse. His eyes seem to stare straight into your soul, and he never ceases to be convincing in the final scene. But best of all is when he says TSI-NAN-FU, with the utmost and purest of evil contorting his mouth, flaring his nostrils, and freezing his eyes.And finally, this film has excellent expressionistic sets: most notably Schramm's Grill, Mabuse's house, the corner it is at, the Count's mansion, and the club where Edgar Hull meets his demise: 11 Hayden street. All in all, this film is a masterpiece in plot, acting, and every other element of film craft. This is the greatest of all silent films.