The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse

The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1960) Peter Barter, respected journalist and broadcaster for a German news program, has gone missing for his evening news program. It turns out he IS the news; he's been murdered on the way to the studio by an unknown assassin, who has fired a shot into his neck while the reporter is stopped at a street-light. The other cars in the jam move on, but a traffic policeman investigates what the hold-up of one car is, and discovers Barter slumped over the steering-wheel, dead.*

But, the unusual thing about the assassination is that the local police had been warned of it before it happened: Inspector Kras (Gert Frobe) had received a call from the blind clairvoyant, Cornelius (Lupo Prezzo), who has seen the future crime happening in his mind's eye. Kras visits Cornelius, and expresses his cynicism about the mystical. What he responds to is cold, hard clues—like the thin blade discovered in Barter's neck that came from a secret military weapon that was under development—but strangely vanished—from the United States.

It's just one of a string of unsolved crimes that have occurred, and they have only one thing in common—the victims have all previously stayed at the Hotel Luxor in Berlin, and the authorities are starting to concentrate their investigative efforts there. That's a lucky thing as the Luxor has another crisis going on that day. Marion Menil (Dawn Addams) is standing on a high ledge of the Hotel, threatening to jump. The police can't reach her, but the American millionaire Henry Travers (Peter Van Eyck) is staying at the Luxor—he's just negotiated buying a British rocket company—and his window is a life-saving arm's length away from the distraught woman. His soothing words and offers to help convince her to come in off the ledge.

Her psychiatrist—who happens to be in the same building—is called. He is Professor Jordan (Wolfgang Preiss) and is treating Marion with hypnosis as she has become agitated by the manipulations of her estranged (and club-footed) husband. The Luxor seems to be the busiest joint in town with Travers and Kras and Jordan and Menil and the husband—and the busy-body press!—all bustling around the rooms and halls and very busy bar. And then there's the vociferous Heironymous B. Mistelzweig (Werner Peters), an insurance agent (and doing good business evidently!) always tagging along trying to get information on leads. It's enough to make the manager, Berg (Andrea Checchi), dehydrate from his constant sweating.

But, Berg knows something about the Luxor not everyone knows—it used to be a Nazi stronghold, designed for and fitted with false rooms (the better for spying) and, keeping up with the times, outfitted with secret cameras and microphones. No one's safe from having their business monitored almost constantly. But, who's doing the watching? 

Interpol has a strange theory: they think that it might be the work of Dr. Mabuse, a crime-kingpin, who had a spider's-web network of contacts and a magician's ability to cloud victim's minds. It's crazy, but we have seen a van of thugs (answering only to numbers) circling around the city-streets in radio contact with the purported voice of Dr. Mabuse giving them orders to carry out—including the murder of that reporter. Then, Kras' office is bombed, that missile plant Travers was buying is sabotaged and Cornelius warns Travers off Marion by saying that a woman would lead to his death.

The film is filled with double-identities, double-tricks, trapped rooms, and a paranoid world-view that would only unimpress the most aluminum-capped conspiracy theorists. It's a continuation of a series that Lang had started on in Nazi Germany, and, returning to post-war Germany and making this film at the age of 70 (it was his last film), it's themes are just as relevant on the pervasive and slippery nature of Evil. But, now that world is not limited to the rarefied world of spies and criminals. As with the films of Hitchcock—most recently in his 1959 film North By Northwest—it spills over into the every-day, invading the nightmares of people just living their lives and turning their normality of quiet desperation ass over tea-kettle. No longer are they being spied on from around corners and through un-draped windows. Now, they're being monitored by technology in the Holy name of Security (as opposed to these days where it's in the Holy names of Convenience and Consumerism). And evil wraps itself in superstition and assumes a mantle of power only because it tells you it's there.

And the thing is, it works...just as well as it did in the Silent Era. The nightmares may have changed over time, but Lang's ability to create them, whole and fresh and insinuating, never ebbed.

* Lang used a similar sequence in his The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, filmed 27 years earlier.