Archive for the ‘Fritz Lang’ Category

Be sure to check out James Oliver’s entertaining AND informative piece The A to Z of Fritz Lang on the MovieMail website, inspired by the upcoming release of M.

Goodness: what a month for DVD releases. Two F.W. Murnau films, a brace of Frank Borzage sets and much else besides. Phew! But if you’re asking me, one release stands towering above them all.

Masters of Cinema’s Dr. Mabuse box set is a wonderful thing indeed, worthwhile even for those who own some of its contents already: the two previously available titles have been spruced up and embellished with fresh extras, while the inclusion of The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse – Fritz Lang’s final film, never previously available for domestic viewing in the UK – seals the deal.

If any films deserve such treatment, it’s these. It’s hard to exaggerate their importance – their influence touches everything from Hitchcock to James Bond and even The Dark Knight. And they remain vital: the most important reason to seek them out is not because they’re historically significant but because their entertainment value is undiminished by age. The first film, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, is 87 years old but few allowances are necessary: it’s as exciting, involving and incisive as it ever was.

Although the films carry his name, Mabuse is in no way a hero. Rather, he is a super-villain, in the grand tradition of Fu Manchu or Fantômas. More than this, he is an agent of chaos: not simply killing and stealing but wilfully creating pandemonium. His reign of terror coincided with Germany’s most turbulent years.

The first part of Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler is subtitled ‘A Portrait of Our Time’ and indeed it was. In 1922, Germany was in a bad way, broken by defeat in war and crippled by hyper-inflation. Lang’s film creates a fictionalised history of these times: Mabuse causes a run on the stock exchange that virtually destroys the economy.

Ten years on and Germany faced a new menace, this time from its newly elected chancellor. By chance – or was it? – Lang had decided to revisit Mabuse. The resultant film was, famously, banned by the Nazi administration who perhaps sensed that Lang was drawing an equivalence between them and the criminal kingpin. It’s a film set in a lunatic asylum: the implication is surely that the inmates have taken over and that authority is insane.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was the last film Lang made in Germany for nearly thirty years. He fled the Nazis, settled in America and turned out some of the most brilliant films of the Hollywood system. But in the twilight of his career, he was tempted back and returned, one last time, for Mabuse. The Thousand Eyes… doesn’t quite match the heights of the earlier instalments, but it has aged well, not least because of its percipient depiction of a surveillance society.

The success of this film ensured that Mabuse would be revived for further misadventures, but it was to be without Lang: he retired after The Thousand Eyes… The subsequent episodes need not detain us: solid commercial thrillers from other directors, lacking in Lang’s mad insight.

But the three films collected here burn as brightly as ever. Although made in a very different era, they are films which resonate in our paranoid times. There isn’t sufficient space here to thank Masters of Cinema for the superlative job they’ve done on the set but they have presented the films as they deserve, no, demand, to be seen.