DVD of the Week: The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse

The nearly seventy-year-old Fritz Lang didn’t really like the idea of making, in 1960, “The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse,” which I discuss in the clip above. He had followed Dr. Mabuse down a four-and-a-half-hour vortex of paranoia in “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler,” from 1921 (I reviewed the DVD in the magazine in 2006), then set him up again, in “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,” from 1933, as Hitler’s doppelgänger. (He told Peter Bogdanovich, “I put all the Nazi slogans into the mouth of the ghost of the criminal.”) But when the producer Artur Brauner pressed him to return to the character he’d “already killed” in the second film, Lang took up the “challenge”:

I had an idea that it might be interesting to show a similar criminal almost thirty years later and again say certain things about our time: the danger that our civilization can be blown up and that on its rubble some new realm of crime could be built up.

In long out-of-print book “The Cinema of Fritz Lang,” from 1969, Paul M. Jensen adds some background, amplified by remarks Lang made in a 1965 interview in Cahiers du Cinéma:

Two news items gave him the basic idea for [the film]. One was about an experimental bullet, developed by the American Army, which leaves no trace. “I wanted, then, to make a brutal and realistic film in a style evoking … the cold reality of today.” The other item, found in recently published Nazi documents, concerned hotels that were to be built in Berlin after the German victory, for the use of visiting diplomats. “In each room would be found a microphone hidden in such a way that at a certain central spot the government would be able to know exactly what was happening in each room. Pushing the idea to the point of imagining hidden TV cameras and a see-through mirror, it seemed to be a possible point of departure for a new, postwar Mabuse.”

The resulting movie has the feel and tone of a live-action cartoon. The lighting is stark, the acting is stiff (the DVD currently in release is dubbed, which doesn’t help, though its lead actress, Dawn Addams, is British), the action ranges from the hieratic to the static—until all hell breaks loose, and Lang, watching violence ramp up from zero to chaos in an instant, choreographs it with precise, harrowing, razor-sharp, and cynical strokes.

Lang was always a precisionist, but it’s interesting to consider the notion that he saw a keener, more inhibiting self-consciousness as characteristic of the postwar age (note the rigid action he gets from such expansive actors as Ida Lupino, Thomas Mitchell, Dana Andrews, and George Sanders in “While the City Sleeps” or, again, from Andrews in “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt”—his two last American films, from 1956) and that such self-awareness regarding social status, love, business, and even politics would have offered little defense against a new generation of insidious agents of ambient catastrophe. History may well have proven him right.