Paula Hammond - Features EditorSay the name Fritz Lang, and most cinephiles will immediately think of the cult science fiction, Metropolis, or the chilling Peter Lorre crime thriller, M.
Yet, two of the defining works of early German cinema were Lang’s Dr Mabuse the Gambler and The Testament of Dr Mabuse—both centred on Norbert Jacques’ nefarious literary supervillain.
In the 1960s, Lang was charged by Artur Brauner’s CCC Film company with making a third crime thriller centred on the infamous Dr Mabuse, completing a trilogy nearly forty years in the making. A huge success, The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse gave CCC the confidence to launch into an entire series focused on the master criminal, which ran between 1960 and 1964, with Wolfgang Preiss in the title role.
In Fritz Lang’s final film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, the eponymous master of disguise (Preiss) re-emerges in the Cold War era after a lengthy absence— and uses all manner of methods to insight murder and mayhem. The Return of Dr Mabuse sees him use brainwashed prison inmates to commit a litany of crimes while evading the German authorities and the FBI. In The Invisible Dr Mabuse, he seeks to use an amazing new invention—a device that renders the user invisible—to his own ends. The Testament of Dr Mabuse—a remake of Lang’s earlier film— has the German police tying themselves in knots as they try to figure out how their adversary could be continuing his reign of terror from inside an asylum. In Scotland Yard Hunts Dr Mabuse, Mabuse’s tentacles begin to creep across the English Channel. Finally, in The Death Ray of Dr Mabuse, the criminal mastermind comes to possess a weapon capable of unleashing untold destruction.
Directed by Fritz Lang, Harald Reinl (Face of the Frog), Werner Klingler (Police Raid), Paul May (Duel with Death) and Hugo Fregonese (Black Tuesday), the CCC Mabuse series continues Fritz Lang’s legacy while playing into a popular market taste in Germany for adaptations of literary krimis—or crime thrillers—throughout the 1960s.
A Thousand Eyes is definitely the best of the 1960s ‘series’, but Reinl, Klingler et al, know their craft and this is an eminently watchable boxset that fans of Noir-ish thrillers will love.
The Masters of Cinema series collects all six 1960s Mabuse films together in one lush boxset, with high definition visuals from 2K restorations.
