An important film rather than a good one, at four and a half hours Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler) is simply too unwieldy to qualify as a quality movie and yet it regularly ranks up there with the best of them, bolstered by the reputation of its director, Fritz Lang, who, whisper it, could turn out some real rubbish when his mind wasn’t on his work.
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is not rubbish though. And in spite of the reservations about its length, this silent behemoth from 1922 is a remarkable document in many ways, though a heavy one, in which Lang lays down the template for all the bad guys, criminal masterminds and super-felons of the future. In a way all Bond villains start here.
Mabuse is, quite simply, a bad man. A gambler, master of disguise, counterfeiter and defiler of women, he’s also a card sharp, an adept at gaming the stock market and a drunkard, and takes a delight in ruining people’s lives, because that’s how he gets his kicks. There is not a shred of decency in the man, no humanity, and Lang and actor Rudolf Klein-Rogge take obvious delight in painting Mabuse in the darkest hues.
The plot is quite simple: after a series of dastardly deeds ruining one life after another Mabuse eventually meets his match, in the shape of state prosecutor von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke), a decent and smart functionary who takes a long time twigging that it’s Mabuse who is behind the string of crimes being carried out in his city, but once he does moves quickly to neutralise his target.
The film was released in two instalments a month apart and that’s the way to watch them, in separate sittings. By the end of part one Mabuse is at the full reach of his powers. By the beginning of part two (which comes with a handy summary of what’s already happened, in case you want to skip the 2.5 hour first part) Mabuse enters his phase of Nietzschean hubris (“There is no luck, only the will to power,” he says at one point), over-reaches and gives Wenk his chance. The moment when Wenk starts to realise that Mabuse is his man is deliciously done with a look by Goetzke almost into the camera lens. We see the penny beginning to drop.
It’s a big, bold, broad entertainment, designed to offer a bit of something for everyone. Starting with an exciting robbery, Lang gives us car chases, explosions, nudity, romance, intrigue, comedy, the supernatural and even a gunfight. For the silent era his actors give relatively understated performances and have all been chosen for their strong features, useful when competing against the numerous eye-catching sets.
Because it’s a 1920s movie, Dr Mabuse the Gambler is often described as being expressionistic. But there are no weird perspectives, no crazy angles and the only real sign of expressionism is in the art on the walls of the home of the Count and Countess Told – victims in different ways of Mabuse’s machinations. Some also make claims about the film’s “state of Weimar Germany” credentials, though there’s really only a five minute stretch when there’s any political content, when Mabuse in one of his many disguises incites a crowd to lawlessness.
Nor is this Lang in his pomp, swinging his camera about in elaborate crane shots. He’s rather static, in fact, with most of the movie shot in much the same way that a Laurel and Hardy movie might be shot, the odd car chase excepted and with the odd special effect (super-imposed images, mostly) the visual catnip.
In many ways it’s a soap opera, with a large cast of characters, emotions writ large, reversals of fortune, misaligned love plots and a resolute focus on everyday life – bars and clubs, prisons, offices, domestic interiors are all lovingly detailed. In the scenes set in the stock exchange all the traders wear top hats and coats with astrakhan collars. It’s a different world, vividly portrayed.
But for all its many positives it is seriously undermined by its length. This extends even to the intertitles. There are just too many of them, for a start, and they’re all overlong, over-explicatory, unnecessarily verbose. The flabbiness doesn’t end there – when Lang makes a point in one scene, he’ll remake it again in another.
The whole thing could have been done more coherently and more thrillingly in far less time, and it was in the Russian version where Sergei Eisenstein supervised an edit that cut the original 20 reels down to eight. Which, if strict maths (eight is 40% of 20) is observed, would reduce 270 minutes to a much more manageable 108 or so.
If you’re still not put off you should seek out one of the version using the excellent Murnau Stiftung restoration as its source. The quality dips here and there where first-generation material was missing but the image quality for the most part is very good. Personally, I’d recommend the Eureka Masters of Cinema issue. Eureka’s stuff is always good and the accompanying material – a good audio commentary and a 32-page booklet in this case – puts a shine on a film Lang obviously treasured. He’d return to Mabuse again, 11 years later, in the talkie The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and again in his last film, 1960’s The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Both much, much shorter!
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
