Highlights:
Lowlights:
I love Lang and what he was going for here, but would recommend the second film in the trilogy, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) over this one. Tellingly, that one clocks in at just over two hours. It also has a more engaging detective and love story. I feel bad dinging the review score a bit given how pioneering the film was and all of its positives, but I have to be true to my enjoyment level too.
- Dr. Mabuse. He's a prototype for so many villains in film history, and as master manipulator who preys on people's fears and exercises mind control over them, is evil in an insidious way. He also bullies his minions and disposes of people after they're no longer useful to him, a true loner with no empathy for humanity. Rudolf Klein-Rogge's look and performance are mesmerizing, no pun intended.
- Fantastic sets with lots of Expressionist touches and art, particularly at the Count's house. Director Fritz Lang combines these with big architectural spaces and excellent mise en scène.
- The sequence at the beginning, with a highly coordinated robbery of a trade agreement from a train, looks straight out of a modern action movie. This transitions to Mabuse manipulating the stock market as he stands over agitated traders, both of which are memorable scenes.
- Lots of other little touches. The noxious gas in the taxi, released at the pull of a lever. The "Chinese glasses", whose reflections are used to confuse and befuddle. The eerie group of blind men helping to count counterfeit money. The tunnel escape. All cool stuff.
- The countess (Gertrude Welcker). Looking for something more out of life, and in her languid eyes you can just see the sentiment behind lines like "I need in life a strong breath of extraordinary thrills and adventures; but, I fear such things have become extinct."
- "Take some cocaine, you wimp!" I chuckled over this line, and coming as it did late in the movie (see below lowlight), imagined it being a directive aimed at flagging audience members.
- Captures the zeitgeist of the times - the chaos of the early Weimar Republic, its economic hardships, and those who antagonized and inflamed people to control them. Mabuse references Nietzsche's will to power, and clearly sees himself as an Übermensch, ideas that also appealed to the emerging Nazi party. "I feel like a state within a state with which I have always been at war!" he bellows, seeming to channel the frustrations of the nationalists.
Lowlights:
- Far, far too long. Probably about two hours too long for the story. The average film length in 1922 was roughly 70 minutes, and at 270 minutes - four and a half hours - this film is nearly four times that. When you combine that with a pace that is often slow and methodical - about average for the period - whew, you're in for a haul, regardless of whether you break your viewing up or damn the consequences and strap yourself in (preferably with a lot of strong black coffee).
- Verbose intertitles. Perhaps a microcosm of the film's bigger issue, the younger Lang didn't seem to understand the value of concision.
I love Lang and what he was going for here, but would recommend the second film in the trilogy, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) over this one. Tellingly, that one clocks in at just over two hours. It also has a more engaging detective and love story. I feel bad dinging the review score a bit given how pioneering the film was and all of its positives, but I have to be true to my enjoyment level too.