O Testamento do Dr. Mabuse

Even today The Testament of Dr Mabuse is refreshingly original and at times startling to watch. Lang was truly one of the greats of cinema and along with Alfred Hitchcock basically invented the suspense film. This film is also the reason Lang left Germany, as it wasn't viewed kindly by the newly elected government.

Fritz Lang's Das TESTAMENT des Dr.MABUSE is a mesmerising, master-crafted entertainment which no serious movie freak will have missed. The largely forgotten, parallel French version, filmed simultaneously with a French speaking cast, is like most of these foreign versions, a poor relation. I'm glad I saw the German one first - twice in a week as it happens.

Shorter than the German film, it truncates the lovers subplot and plays it with colourless juveniles, omits the giant eye make up shots of Klein Rogge, which re-call Dr. Baum's art collection and, worse, attempts to up the pace by chopping off the fade out scene transitions - giving correctly, the impression that there is something missing.

The German cast is uniformly superior, with the possible exception of the jolly, frankfurter-cooking henchman, who does manage to make an impression. Jim Gerald was a comedian - effectively so in CHAPEAU de PAILEE d'ITALIE and FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS - and he lacks the monolith menace that Wernike provides. Thommy Bordelle is normally an unimposing performer and, giving it his best shot, he's still no fair swap for the the great Oscar Beregei, in the one circulating film where we get to hear Beregei's voice. The French Dr. Kramm (who is he?), in particular, is out classed by Theodore Loos (the secretary from METROPOLIS among other stand-out performances).

Well it's still Lang's Mabuse film and remains intermittently effective - Hoffmeister's vision of Lohman's entry into his see through cell is still a grabber - and it is another piece of the jig saw and another, if minor, Lang movie. So nice to get to see it after all these years.

The film reads like a trainer for all the thrillers that came thereafter: The staring face reminiscent of 'Alien', the scary opening scene, which deserves to be better known, the tough but lovable cop, the haunted (literally) master criminal, the asylum, the heroine with an excuse to get her dress all wet and clingy, the Mae West look-alike, the spooky special effects, the explosions and the fires (real ones not your computer generated rubbish), the shoot out, the chase through the woods, the car chase, the high tech gadgets (using 78 vinyl!). There's even what looks like a placement add (Mercedes, during the car chase). Yes, all the thriller clichés are there but way back in 1933 they weren't clichés. Unfortunately some rather wooden acting by the heroine, Wera Liessem, who seems to be stuck in silent film mode, mars the film.

As for the political overtones, I'm not sure if these were deliberate. Lang's stories about himself were as fantastical as his films, especially the one about being offered the head of the Reich films.

Of all storytelling mediums, the one that perhaps has most in common with cinema is the comic book. Both tell stories primarily through pictures, both have a similar concept of the frame, and both become clumsy and uninteresting if they rely too much on words. But few films immersed themselves so completely in a comic book-style world as the German pictures of Fritz Lang.

What is especially comic-bookish about a picture like Testament of Dr Mabuse is not just its fast-paced adventure plot, but its timeless, placeless exaggeration of reality. Just like Batman's Gotham City, there are few if any references to real locations or people, and every character and organisation is a surreal caricature of a real-world counterpart. That's why Tim Burton's is the best Batman, because it properly recreates that over-the-top version of reality. This approach is also what makes pictures like this so compelling and accessible.

It's because of this approach that I feel this is a (slightly) superior picture to M. M was really the only one of Lang's German pictures that, plot-wise at least, seemed grounded in reality, and yet it is still populated those crazy character types. However , in the comic-book world of Dr Mabuse these figures fit right in. Otto Wernicke reprises his role as Inspector Karl "Fatty" Lohmann (hurrah!), and the character seems much more at home here.

This picture is not quite so tightly constructed as M, but Lang instead throws everything into creating a sense of unease. As with the first Dr Mabuse film (Der Spieler, shot by Lang in 1922), audience participation is crucial. Lang several times has Dr Baum speak his lines straight into the camera, making the character audience and the real-world audience share the same angle. In locations such as the "curtain room" he shows us all sides, so that we too feel trapped between those four walls. Since his silent days he has added a new string to his bow, in that he now uses the occasional camera movement to physically pull the audience into the film's world. Also consider the final moment in relation to this pattern of camera-as-audience shots.

The Testament of Dr Mabuse is a captivating, horror-tinged thriller, and the last great picture to be produced in Germany before things went tits up, politically. It seems to represent everything that made Weimar cinema perfect for Lang, and everything that made him a misfit in Hollywood – its surreal theatricality, its dominance of set-design over actors, its blending of genres. Like the comic book writer, Lang dealt in myths (both in and out of his films - the story of his meeting with Goebbels, for example, is almost certainly a fabrication). The Testament of Dr Mabuse is one of his greatest.

Lang's last film in Germany before he hurriedly left the country (the director claimed that he had lately been offered a key position in the Nazi-controlled film industry), The Testament Of Dr Mabuse (aka: Das Testament des Dr Mabuse) is best seen as a warning by a departing talent, as well as a continuation of many of the themes of the director's previous work. Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) had been a great success, and his new film, his second made in sound, capitalises on the reputation both of the earlier film and the grand social malevolence of its central character. Mabuse is another of Lang's evil, all-controlling masterminds - he was to reappear again in the director's last film, The 1,000 Eyes Of Dr Mabuse (1960) - the representation of whose hypnotic presence and malign influence was to find disfavour with the followers of Hitler. The Nazis gained power during the post-production period of the film and, while recognising the great director's talent; Testament was promptly banned by Goebbels who found the political portrait implicit in Mabuse too close to home. In later years Lang was to suggest that the film was intended as a political parable, although this might have been exaggerated.

As the present film opens, Inspector Lohmann (a splendidly grouchy Otto Wernicke) receives a message from a former criminal associate who has stumbled onto a massive criminal conspiracy. Before the details can be spelt out, the crook is hunted down and killed. Investigating his disappearance Lohmann discovers the name Mabuse scratched on a windowpane (a clue echoed in Lang's M, in which Lohmann also appears.) Mabuse is discovered in an asylum in the charge of Dr Baum (Oscar Beregi). The criminal genius, insane but with his remaining magnetic attraction intact, is feverishly writing detailed notes on prospective crimes. When Mabuse dies, a visiting Dr Kramm finds the brilliant criminal notes of Dr Mabuse on the floor, compares a news report of a jewellery robbery to what he is now reading and tells Baum that he is going to report it to the police. He is promptly killed by Mabuse's elite Section 2B hitmen on orders from the unseen leader - a scene set in traffic that found an echo over 30 years later in The Ipcress File (1965). Meanwhile a romance develops between Kent (Gustav Diessel), one of the henchmen of Mabuse's gang, still apparently controlled by remote control instructions, and the woman Lilly (Vera Liessem) who helped him when he was down and out. Mabuse's 'testament' thus lies in both the meticulously planned crimes, which make up his posthumous papers as well as his hypnotic and malign influence on those who are controlled by him.

Critics have compared the visual style of this film with those of others from the same period, notably Spione (aka: Spies, 1928), Lang's most recent comparable social thriller. Testament is far more cluttered, its visual confusion suggesting moral complexity as well as the closing in of threatening events - both as far as the characters are concerned and, as it unfortunately turned out, for German society in general. In M, evil was detected in the presence of a murderous outsider, one eventually brought to book by a benign conspiracy of the underworld. Here there is a web of criminal activity and corruption from which no one is entirely immune, and in which many are driven by a murderous compulsion to obey an evil power. At the same time, Lang is happy enough to introduce into this world of social corruption elements of thrills and suspense, which spring from a much simpler world of serials and adventure stories. The near documentary feel of a lot of the film is interspersed with explosions, floods, chases and close escapes. In this way the sombre, far reaching criminalities of Mabuse's schemes, rooted in current socio-political unrest are counter-pointed with time honoured pleasures brought by crime melodrama. Lang had a weakness for this sort of drama: The Spiders Part II: The Diamond Ship (1920) contains a somewhat similar but much shorter, scene, where the hero is also trapped in a water filling room from which he escapes. It has been noted just how much of the action of Testament plays out like a dream, and in this sense it anticipates the disorientating mood which would characterise much of noir cinema of a few years later - of which the newly Americanised Lang would be a major exponent. Certainly the arch criminal mastermind of Mabuse has something in common with such later characters as, say Mike Lagana in The Big Heat (1953) although such figures in Lang's American period are far less omniscient. Once Hitler was out of the way, Lang increasingly saw the manipulation of human life as the province of fate rather than men, a view that had made its first ongoing appearance as far back as Der Müde Tod (Destiny, 1923). In Testament, some indeed appear pre-doomed by a nemesis stalking them, although this is largely placed in the human realm. Events play out like an unstoppable nightmare - a feeling reinforced by Mabuse's somnambulistic appearance as he constructs evil from his bed, the presence of ghosts, the unreality of the mysterious drama which unfolds and such scenes as the weird opening, its surreal use of factory sound anticipating the dark sound-scapes of Eraserhead (1978). By the end of Lang's film there is a sense that all have been involved in some grand combine of evil, and that the disorder and social chaos it presages has only just been forestalled - not by justice, but madness.

Modern viewers coming to Lang's film will find much to enjoy, even if some of the incidental elements have necessarily become a little dated. The editing and camerawork are excellent, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge's piercingly intense Mabuse is a memorable creation. Lohmann and the supporting cast are memorable characters, although the romantic interest between Kent and Lilly looks a little faded after all these years. It's a film in which special effects go hand in hand with suspense and the staging is still impressive. Amongst the most memorable scenes are those are the end with the destruction of the chemical factory and the expressionistic car chase back to the asylum. Most importantly, while the morally debilitating effects of the post-war German depression as well as the impending rise of adulatory Nazism have now passed into history, Lang's dramatisation of cause and effect remains as electric as ever in one of the finest films of his early sound career.