Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922, Fritz Lang) (Patreon)

70/100

Needlessly fussy business* first, because for once it’s actually kinda relevant. I logged this as two films on my site, having determined that they were originally released in Germany a month apart and intended to be seen with a long break in between. (Even in DVD/Blu releases that combine them, Part Two still repeats the entire opening credits and then spends a good 10 minutes just recapping Part One.) Unlike Kill Bill and Nymph()maniac, however—both of which I find significantly stronger in their initial salvo—Dr. Mabuse feels like the exact same entity throughout, neither improving nor diminishing over the course of its 4½ hours. So both parts get the same rating (down to decimal points), and it makes sense to review the whole thing in one go.

Of course, the very concept of a “feature film” was still somewhat murky in 1922, and Lang’s clearly working in the serial tradition here: Each part is itself divided into six chapters of roughly equal length, most of them ending on a cliffhanger or some other dramatic development. What’s more, this sucker’s all forward narrative motion all the time, with relatively few of the purely visual flourishes that would dominate Lang’s subsequent two-part epic (Die Nibelungen) and then bear full fruit in Metropolis. Thus we have a floor and a ceiling: Dr. Mabuse stays in a groove fluctuating between absorbing and gripping for its entire mammoth duration—quite an achievement in itself—but there’s not a whole lot happening underneath that groove. Admittedly, some sociopolitical themes may have escaped me, a century later; both parts’ subtitles (translated by Kino Lorber as The Great Gambler. A Portrait of Our Time and Inferno. A Play on the People of Our Time) certainly indicate a desire on Lang’s part for viewers to draw parallels between his movie and the world at large (or then-modern Germany, at least). All the same, I can’t honestly claim to have detected any warning of incipient Fascism, say, in this tale of a criminal mastermind who’s a master of disguise, silently hypnotizing victims into doing his bidding. Unlike Metropolis, it’s not constantly dazzling to behold; unlike M, it doesn’t expertly fuck with my nervous system by making its central figure at once monstrous and pitiable. It’s just…fun.

Dark fun, to be sure. This often feels like a Sherlock Holmes tale in which Holmes has no particular gift for observation and our sympathies wind up allied with Moriarty, simply by dint of the latter’s superior charisma; Klein-Rogge (assisted by the film’s costume and makeup teams) does a superb job of creating the illusion of someone who can credibly appear both older and younger than his roughly 35 years—there were at least two instances in which I didn’t immediately recognize Mabuse—while also wielding that inimitable, unnerving bore-a-hole-into-you gaze. Oddly enough, the film (or perhaps Norbert Jacques’ source novel) gives its villain supernatural powers and then repeatedly suggests that he doesn’t even necessarily need them, so expert is he at manipulating people in the conventional manner. Not sure I’ve ever seen a better market panic (as engineered by Mabuse, via an act of theft that’s not what it appears to be), and the method used to get a captured goon in sniper range, so that he can be silenced before he spills his guts, puts to shame most every thriller machination of recent vintage. And that’s not even the stuff that anyone remembers! My one sizable complaint—apart from Bernhard Goetzke’s Prosecutor Von Wenk being a bit of a bland drip (to the point where I don’t really buy him resisting Mabuse’s spell during their first encounter)—is that the film fails to take full advantage of Gertrude Welcker’s magnificently languid-verging-on-listless performance as the Countess. It’s mere cute irony, barely explored, that she yearns for arm’s-length adventure and winds up abducted; opportunities abounded for some real perversity, and this seemed like just the merciless movie to embrace them. Disappointing that she becomes a conventional damsel in distress, though the Countess I loved does re-emerge at the very end, walking out like a zombie when rescued.

All in all, terrific stuff, even if it remains, for me, stubbornly surface-level in its appeal. I do have two thread-tugging questions, though—one for each part, maintaining the balance. Part One: It’s entirely unclear to me why Mabuse orders Carozza to initiate a relationship with Hull, and makes no attempt to collect the huge sum of money that Hull didn’t have on hand during the poker game (save for sending one reminder that the sum is still due and collectable at will). I assumed this was all part of some elaborate long con, but no further steps are ever taken; Mabuse admittedly gets valuable info about Von Wenk’s investigation via Hull by way of poor lovelorn Carozza, but that’s not something he should have anticipated. What’s the angle? Feel like I missed something crucial. Part Two: Why does “Weltmann” (Mabuse in disguise) need to write down a fake note for the hypnotized Von Wenk (instructing him to go home) and surreptitiously swap it with the real note (instructing him to drive off a cliff)? It’s not as if Von Wenk ever reads or hears either one of them—Mabuse presumably implants the suggestion mentally. (I’m also not sure why he succeeds this time after having failed previously, especially given that he employs the same “Oriental” command.) Seems like he could have just written down the fake one, to be opened onstage by someone else, thereby saving himself both time and ink. Maybe it’s just a means of establishing the cliff’s geographical location, so that its name can then barrel down the road in front of Von Wenk’s speeding car (one of this film’s few offbeat visual touches, albeit one already employed by Dr. Caligari).

Oh, and I couldn’t find a good spot for it anywhere above, but I have to note how hard I laughed at something that I’m not 100% sure was even meant to be a joke, though it was almost uncomfortably (and thus hilariously) relatable to me: Mabuse, with the cops closing in, going through his papers and placing them in two separate piles—one large, one smaller, both of them on fire. Even when destroying documents, please, let’s categorize them correctly.

* Decided I didn’t want to start with the word “anal-retentive,” which btw always triggers a warning from Patreon that someone may look over my post to ensure that it’s not porn. (See below.)