Die TAUSEND AUGEN DES DR MABUSE

(vt The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse; vt The Diabolical Dr Mabuse) Film (1960). CCC Filmkunst/CEI Incom/Criterion. Dir Fritz LANG, starring Dawn Addams, Peter Van Eyck, Gert Frobe, Wolfgang Preiss, Werner Peters. Screenplay Lang, Heinz Oskar Wuttig, based on characters created by Norbert Jacques (1880-1954), author of Dr Mabuse, Master of Mystery (trans Lilian A. Clare 1923 UK). 103 mins. B/w.

   After a gap of 27 years Fritz Lang returned, in this West German, Italian and French coproduction, both to the character who had helped make him famous and from the USA in order to do it; it was to be his last film. His other films about Dr Mabuse - the evil genius who seeks world conquest - were the 2-part DR MABUSE, DER SPIELER (1922), also borderline sf, and Das Testament des Dr Mabuse(1933). DTADDM, which received a very mixed critical reception, tells of a kind of Mabuse REINCARNATION (whose identity - or identities - is not revealed until the end) who operates from a hideout, fitted with monitors, in a grand hotel whose every room is bugged with hidden tv cameras; he seeks control of an atomic-weapons empire as part of his scheme for international anarchy. The film is absurdly plotted and slow-moving, but is powerful in its single-minded pursuit of images of vision (and of its distortion): screens, one-way mirrors, a blind seer, dark glasses, disguises, masquerades. It has been described as Lang's masterpiece. In Germany it was successful enough to catalyse the making of 5 furtherMabuse films (1961-4) which Lang, now in his 70s, refused to direct; they feature, successively, zombies, invisibility, post-mortem hypnotism, a hypnotizing machine and death rays.

   PN