Reinventing a genre he had more or less invented in the first place, Fritz Lang’s 1960 movie The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (originally Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse) also revisits an established intellectual property.
The character of Mabuse had already served Lang well, having taken centre stage as the arch-villain in Lang’s silent two-part behemoth Dr Mabuse the Gambler in 1922 and again in The Testament of Dr Mabuse in 1933. After which Lang exited Germany in a hurry, having been made an offer he couldn’t refuse by Dr Goebbels, an arch-villain to top them all.
In the late 1950s, old and almost blind, Lang returned to Germany to make the third of the Mabuse movies. There would be six more, none of them directed by Lang. This was his last film in a 40-year run during which, with movies like Metropolis, Spies, M, The Woman in the Window and The Big Heat, he staked a claim to be considered one of the greats.
He’s not going down without a fight though. This may be a cheap, quickly made movie – look out for the sort of fluffs that would never have gone defluffed in Hollywood – but it’s absolutely bursting with entertainment value. Part romance, part thriller, part policier, part comedy, it’s also full of larger than life characters.
Lang sets his story in the Hotel Luxor, the focus of an investigation into a string of deaths connected by only one fact – all of the victims had spent time there. As the affable cop Inspector Kras (Gert Fröbe) tries to work out how this place fits into the puzzle, he bumps up against Henry Travers (Peter van Eyck), an American entrepreneur with an interest in nuclear power, Marion Menil (Dawn Addams), a beautiful woman introduced on the point of throwing herself to her death from a high-up ledge, creepy blind clairvoyant Peter Cornelius (Wolfgang Preiss) and bumptious insurance agent Hieronymus B (“for belly” he delights in telling everyone he meets) Mistelzweig (Werner Peters).
No one is really who they say they are, and the arc of the movie is the revelation of the truth, some of it by chance, some by the inspector’s investigations.
The 1,000 eyes of the title refer to the many cameras hidden all over the hotel – it was built by the Nazis, we’re told, and their listening devices have since been upgraded. Surveillance is the grand theme. Everyone is being watched at all times, and what with a two-way mirror that’s a significant part of the plot, and almost everyone role-playing like crazy, there is much to reveal.
The Nazis rumble around in the background, which was unusual in German movies of the era. Lang may be 70 at this point but he’s still sharp and his screenplay (co-written with Heinz Oskar Wuttig) gets a jump on young turks like Rainer Werner Fassbinder with its sub-theme of a murky past no one talks about but which continues to influence the present.
Serious stuff to one side, there’s a James-Bond-before-James-Bond ambience about the whole thing. It’s really a big spy movie on a small scale, with girls and gadgets, jeopardy and masterminds, jokes and spills.
The cast is great, in an ensemble Agatha Christie kind of way, with Fröbe a revelation as the dog-eared detective if you only know him as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger, Werner Peters excellent as the endlessly quipping comedy foil Mistelzweig, and Dawn Addams a fine damsel in distress (though not half as much distress as she’s making out). Wolfgang Preiss, the blind clairvoyant, is particularly sinister, and he plays two other roles, one of them as the highly strung Marion’s ever-hovering doctor, and the other is in spoiler territory, though it’s pretty obvious which way this movie is going to shake down.
Lang’s fluid camera and his love of a crane shot to leave a scene (crane in) and enter one (crane out) marks this out as unmistakeably him, and there are a few other visual reminders of Lang’s high period in the 1940s. What a career he’d had. With 1928’s Spies (Spione), Lang invented the spy thriller. Here he is at the other end of a long road reinventing it and getting most of the furniture in place ready for Sean Connery just two years down the road.
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
