Moonfleet (1955)

Moonfleet (Fritz Lang, 1955) Fritz Lang's only film in Cinemascope—a format he famously described as only good for shooting "snakes and funerals" (well, he says it in Contempt, anyway!). 

 

"Moonfleet" was a popular novel published in 1898 and was considered a classic of literature—on a par with Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island"—but not so much in the U.S. Producer John Houseman, working at M-G-M, maybe influenced by the success of Disney's 1950 version of Stevenson's classic, wedged in Moonfleet between prestige pictures, but on a limited budget—no ocean scenes, no tall ships, no cluttered sword-riots, no piratey aspects that required crowds and location work. Lang, who actually preferred studio work over the capricious lighting of location scenes, was hired two weeks before shooting started and hadn't worked at M-G-M since his first film in America, the 1936 production of Fury. The script had aspects of the novel, but didn't follow it too closely, taking the novel's hero and making him a child, as opposed to the young man of the novel, who depends on an older mercenary smuggler to pursue his quest of a legendary diamond belonging to the pirate Blackbeard.

That's one way to use the Cinemascope frame.

 

Well, it's "Redbeard" in the movie (public domain issues?). Young John Mohune (Jon Whiteley) is sent by his dying mother to the town of Moonfleet, site of the original Mohune estate, to seek out a man with whom she had a past, Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger). Exhausted by his travel, young John wakes up in a tavern surrounded by ruffians—including Dan Seymour and Jack Elam—who search him and find a letter from the boy's mother, appointing Fox as John's guardian. It's convenient because Fox just happens to be the man now occupying the Mohune manse.

It's inconvenient because, when Fox hears this, he wants nothing to do with the boy, being a man of the world and all. But, he does acknowledge knowing the mother, being fond of her, and that he and the boy may have more in common than Fox will acknowledge—like the boy's nightmares of being attacked by dogs echoing the scars on Fox's back from such an attack while he was running from the Mohune house so many years ago. Probably as many years as the boy's been alive, but the film skirts this issue, while hinting that it's probably true. Still, he plans to have the boy sent packing in the morning, while he continues on to Moonfleet.

 

He, of course, hasn't reckoned with the boy being a Mohune, and a tenacious one at that. The boy manages to make his escape and, with the help of some locals, make his way back to his family's estate, where he finds Fox in mid-debauch, hosting several drunken lords, complete with entertainment by a gypsy dancer (Liliane Montevecchi). Young John insists he won't be sent away this time and that he intends to stay with Fox as per his mother's wishes. Fox is impressed by the boy, but secretly intends to send him away to the colonies on the next boat. When Fox's mistress Mrs. Minton (Viveca Lindfors) accuses Fox of his actions towards John as being proof of his continuing love for the boy's mother, he tells her that, in that case, she can leave on the same boat with him.

The next day, John attends church services, where he is informed—via a fiery sermon about superstition—that the villagers fear that the spirit of the pirate Red Beard, who was a Mohune, is haunting the church graveyard looking for the diamond that made him renounce his military career and become a pirate. While walking the grounds that night, John falls into an open grave that leads to the catacombs under the church full of broken caskets and the bones of the departed. But Fox's pirates come down there, too, looking for potential riches, and the boy finds a locket while hiding away from sight.

When rescued from the catacombs by Fox, his band is ready to slit the boy's throat for anything the kid might have found, and when Fox defends the boy, the pirates—being pirates—turn against him. This puts Fox in a difficult position—he is being challenged by his own band at the same time he's trying to finagle a deal with the duplicitous magistrate Lord Ashwood (venomed by George Sanders, as only George Sanders can) and his equally devious wife (played by the ever-delightful Joan Greenwood in her first American role).

That locket John has snatched will contain  a secret that must be decoded and from there, Fox and friend must evade his former co-conspirators, as well as the Ashwoods, and the authorities to find the diamond and extricate it from its hiding place smack-dab in the middle of a military prison, even while they're considered wanted fugitives. This gives plenty of opportunity for composer Miklós Rózsa to create bustling tension music (which sounds like it's a dress rehearsal for his score for Ben-Hur), while the duo put themselves directly in harms way to achieve their goals.

It's not the novel—which shares the diamond and the locket and the clues, and that's about it—but Lang makes the most out of the material scraped from the book to accommodate Granger's starring persona, while directing it from the vantage of a child's point of view, and enveloping it in a child's nightmare of Gothic structures and macabre situations, with a mentor who is as questionable a father-figure as one could encounter (outside of Dickens). Maybe that's why it never found an audience—too "mature" for kids, too cynical for adults, and not "family-friendly"—which led Houseman to write: "All too often, in those days, I felt that the director was receiving credit for the producer's work. This time (Lang) was taking the blame for the producer's errors." Hard to believe that—with all of his fanciful German work, Moonfleet was the most expensive film, Lang ever worked on.

Fury (1936)

Fury (Fritz Lang, 1936) Fritz Lang's first American film (after fleeing Nazi Germany) taking on a compelling story that, like his German work, exposes the cracks of society within a strong story narrative, this time focusing on this country's scourge of lynching and the fragile way that rights can be trampled by mob rule and political cowardice. Although somewhat compromised by a last-minute studio mandate to tack on a more happy ending to the story, it plumbs the depths of the cruelty that humans can do to each other. 

 

The heads at M-G-M had good reason to be scared. Spencer Tracy stars as an ordinary Joe—Joe Wilson, in fact—engaged to Katherine Grant (Sylvia Sidney) but too poor to get married. Katherine decides to leave Chicago to take a job in the town of Strand, hoping to save enough money so she can come back and marry Joe. For his part, Joe stays in the Windy City with his two brothers, Tom and Charlie, who are mixed in with organized crime. Joe convinces them to go straight and together they open a gas station, which turns enough of a profit that Joe decides to not wait the full year as intended and takes a car to Strand to bring Katherine home, writing her to tell her the time and place they will meet.

His timing could be better. Stopping to camp out half-way between the two cities, he reads about a kidnapping and thinks nothing of it—tomorrow, he'll be in the town of Strand and starting a new life with Katherine.

 

He has no idea that by the next time tomorrow night, his life will be over.

The next morning, driving up to Strand to meet Katherine, he's pulled over by a cop (Walter Brennan) for his out-of-state plates, suspicious that they might be tied to the kidnappers. When told to empty his pockets, Joe tells him that all he has in his pockets are peanuts that he munches on. "Whole shell?" asks the cop. Yes. That's enough reason to bring him to the sheriff (Edward Ellis), and Joe's questioned about the peanuts—the ransom note had traces of peanut dust on them—and about a $5 bill he's carrying—part of the ransom. Joe protests his innocence and tells the Sheriff to call his brothers, they'll vouch for him. The sheriff, being cautious, puts Joe in a holding cell and tells him he'll do some digging.

Pretty soon—thanks to a little of the arresting cop's bragging and encouragement from what they used to call an "outside agitator" (Bruce Cabot) passing through town—a  crowd starts to gather outside the jail, wanting to talk to the sheriff about the prisoner, demanding to see him. The sheriff posts a guard outside the jail and tells them that there's an investigation and that the prisoner is innocent until proven guilty and protected by the law. The city council is also riled up, but are told the district attorney is looking into the case, but hasn't called back, and they should be patient, despite what the news might bring to the town. He also warns them that unless things come under a little bit more control, he's going to call the National Guard on the crowd.

But, the district attorney is told that the Governor won't send out the Guard—towns don't like troops descending on them and making such a move would be a risky political move. By now, the sheriff and his men have moved back inside the jail because the mob has started throwing bricks and refuse at them. Stymied by the locked and barricaded door, the crowd decides to ram it in and take Joe by force. The police fight them off.

By this time, Katherine has been waiting awhile for Joe at their rendezvous and wondering what's happened to him. She's informed that the Strand police have arrested a "Joe Wilson" for the big kidnapping and he's being held in the town jail. Alarmed, Katherine runs to the town to find what's going on. What she finds is a scene right out of hell...and being filmed for the news reels.

Joe is trapped inside the jail as it's set on fire and can only plead with the crowd as they jeer outside, screaming for his death. As if to seal the deal, one of the mob throws dynamite through a cell window and it explodes. The jail burns to the ground. In the morning, the headlines are also screaming, but the town has fallen silent. When the sheriff's office starts their investigation, the town is substantially quieter, no one is willing to speak, lest they themselves get arrested and the district attorney is having trouble drawing up a case. But, wait...remember that news-reel film? In lieu of selfies, it goes a long way to identifying the perp's.

The district attorney indicts twenty-two people...but for what crime? It's not murder, because no body has been found in all the debris. The newsreel footage shows Joe was in the building, but, due to lack of forensic evidence, it looks like the rioters will get away scot-free. Will there be no justice for poor Joe?

Well, don't feel so bad for "poor Joe." It seems he escaped death, and reveals himself to his brothers staying in town to help authorities. And Joe is mad. Mad that the mob who wanted him to burn to death may not getting everything that's coming to him. He wants the death penalty for all of them, and he's willing to do whatever it takes—in secret—to make sure that they're punished for his death...even though he's still alive. He wants to teach a lesson. But, the lesson is not what he thinks. For Joe has become just as vengeful as the mob that burned down the jail. He has become as bad as they were.

 

Revenge stories have always left a bad taste in my eyes. They perpetuate the myth of "an eye for an eye"—which only makes people more blind. And movies—action movies, thrillers, "adventure" movies—are full of these types of themes, giving an impotent public a visceral thrill, supposedly balancing the books—but with a sledge-hammer. What makes Fury different is that it dares to show consequences where the hunter of tigers...actually becomes the tiger. It shows the lynched become the lyncher. And it's not pretty. It's not even satisfying. It is a wrong piled on top of a wrong and Fury knows it's not right. Sure, the mob is vilified. They should be. But, in seeking his revenge, Joe becomes a villain, too. There's no "they got what they deserved" satisfaction to it when the victim becomes a vigilante with murder on his mind. Lang had just come away from a society that lost any sense of justice and lived by the twisted morals of the mob.

 

He found the same symptoms in America. He'd still find them today.

M (1931)

M (aka M-Eine Stadt sucht einen Mördor, Fritz Lang, 1931) A rash of child-murderers in the Weimar Republic led Fritz Lang and his then-wife Thea von Harbou to use it for what Lang wished to be a film about "the ugliest, most utterly loathsome crime."

He could only have topped it if he'd stayed in Germany and waited a few years. Indeed, when he was attempting to arrange the start of filming, he was refused the use of Staaken Studios, as the head of production was a Nazi and thought the working title—"Murderers Among Us"—would be critical of the up-and-coming political movement. One wonders why, if he thought that was the case, he wanted to be a Nazi Party member in the first place. Actually, given History and given people, one no longer wonders.

 

But, Lang's M had more things on its mind than just a film about a child murderer. Lang's films usually did.

Lang presents the emotional issue in one shot.

 

The film begins with an ironic sequence—children in a circle out on a street playing a counting-out game (where when a child is pointed at, they drop out, or disappear from the game) with a rhyme that has to do with a "man in black" who makes "mincemeat" out of children with a "cleaver's blade." One by one, children get eliminated. How's that for foreshadowing? The song is an annoyance to one of the women at the tenement who is taking her laundry up to be washed, and when she complains about the kids, the washer-woman says "At least if we hear them, we know they're safe."

Then, it's a good thing this is Lang's first film utilizing sound. And a cacophonous world it is, with street-noises, off-screen alarms and sirens...even the passage of time when her little girl doesn't arrive for her regular lunch is emphasized mockingly with a cuckoo clock. In fact, after the titles, the first thing we hear is that children's on-the-nose game-chant. When the little girl is late, the woman no longer depends on sound and goes looking, asking the other kids coming up the stairs if they'd seen her. Then, as if to emphasize that she's not coming, Lang shows her empty place at the table, the yawning empty staircase to her flat, the still basement—then, outside, telephone wires to which gets stuck a balloon that we had seen a man buying for her, then the girl's ball as it rolls...and becomes still.

Horrible things are done in this film, but Lang shows them off-screen, suggestively, and lets the audience do the dirty work, making us culpable. But, we're not alone in this. As fear grips the city, everyone becomes suspicious of each other. Talking to a kid on the street? You could be the murderer! The accusations are made directly to the camera, as if we're the guilty ones. Suspicions turn into accusations, and the police, under considerable political pressure starts to ramp up their investigation, looking in all those empty spaces for victims, rousting criminal hang-outs for clues, making the city sweat, especially those dens of iniquity where aberrant behavior are ever-present.

While the populace looks over their shoulders, buying up the hysterical headlines in the newspaper, squinting at any suspicious activity (or even not suspicious!), the criminal element begins to feel the heat and they determine to catch the pedophile by the means the police don't have at their disposal—their own spider's web of a network utilizing beggars on the street to keep an eye on every child. The police, meanwhile, are narrowing down their suspects and starting to close in. It's just a matter of who catches him first, the authorities or the outlaws.

We already know who it is: we've watched him (Peter Lorre) work, watched him write taunting letters to the paper, watched at how close he gets to getting caught and slip away. But, it's the investigations that take him out of the shadows and provide him with a name and a familiarity. We've listened as he whistled "In the Hall of the Mountain King" and fretted, even if we haven't seen him, but felt the tension increase. Then, when he's been marked, we watch as he struggles to avoid detection only to realize that it's not the police he has to fear, but everyone around him. The tables have been turned. The populace are no longer potential victims, but potential threats.

Murderers as victims. Criminals as detectives. The audience as co-conspirator. Lang's film—his favorite of his career—subverts so many elements to such devastating effect that's it's no wonder anyone who wants to make a thriller—at least a smart, cynical one—has borrowed from Lang's playbook for many years. And his parlaying of a black and white world into one where the colors are switched was so alarming to the Nazi's that once they seized power, they banned the film in July of 1934 (although they did use clips of it in their anti-Semitic propaganda). Seems they didn't want any moral complexity for the masses. Black is black and White is right and they got to choose what was good and evil in the Universe (they chose wrong). Lang saw child murderers as vermin. But, he also saw vigilantism and mob-think as dangerous, as well. The message he said he wanted to convey was "watch your children" not only to keep them from harm, but prevent them from becoming monsters, as well.

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.

Woman in the Moon (1929)

Woman in the Moon (aka Die Frau in Mond, Fritz Lang, 1929) It's the 52nd anniversary of the first Moon Landing by humans (and yes, it did happen and it happened five more times—which brings up the question "why would you fake it six times?"), but movie-makers had been imagining such a scenario for almost as long as there have been movies. There is, of course, A Trip to the Moon, made in 1902 by Georges Méliès, but another one—at least the one that survives—is Fritz Lang's fanciful adaptation of his then-wife's novel "Die Frau in Mond" which was produced two years after his landmark work, Metropolis.

The story tells of an industrialist, Wolf Helius (Willy Fritsch), who visits a scientist, Professor George Manfedt (Klaus Pohl), living in decrepitude after being laughed out of academia by his vision of traveling to the Moon. Manfredt speculates that there is valuable mineral deposits on the Moon, including gold, which would make such a journey economically advantageous—no need for any sort of political one-ups-manship to stimulate such a reckless adventure. Helius begins plans for such a journey. But, there are complications.

A cadre of rival industrialists have been following Manfredt's work, and they dispatch a spy (Fritz Rasp), using the name "Walter Turner", to gain access to the plans. They rob Helius, gaining access to the research, and demand to be part of it, or else they will make attempts to sabotage the project. With so much at stake, Helius agrees to their demands and the man named "Turner" is allowed to accompany the flight.

Also on board will be Helius' two assistants, engineer Hans Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim) and Friede Velten (Gerda Maurus)—for whom the moon-ship, Friede, is named. The two have recently announced their engagement, a proposal that Helius privately disapproves of, as he is also in love with Frieda. The ship is launched, but, unbeknownst to the vital but conflicted crew, there is a stowaway on board, the youngster Gustav (Gustl Gstettenbaur), who is an avid collection of pulp science fiction magazines.

Now, look. The thing about science fiction, however the media it is presented in, is that it is actually "Prescience"-fiction—a leap of imagination that takes a look at the world and pre-cognitions what it will be in the future. This is always a bit problematic, for there is more than a chance, as we advance through the years, with ever more diverse discoveries and technologies, that the imagineer will get as much wrong as they can get right. When the year 2001 arrived, it was ruefully noted that the movie 2001: a Space Odyssey—as strenuously researched as it was—was wildly off the mark. Not only were there no manned flights to Jupiter, but we were decades from its achieving its vision of Pan-Am shuttles routinely flitting into space (and, in fact, by 2001, Pan-American had gone out of business!). It did get I-pads right, though...

So, one can look at The Woman in the Moon and chortle with the advantage of hindsight about there being gold, or water (found with a divining rod?), or a breathable atmosphere on the Moon, or that the gravity might be equal to Earth's, or that such a primitive craft could make it there.*

But, look at what they got right: The flight would have to be achieved with a multi-stage rocket; the launch vehicle is constructed in an industrial building and then tracked to a launch-pad; they get "G"-forces right, putting the passengers in horizontal beds; although technically wrong, when the rockets are shut off, the crew experience micro-gravity—at one point, the engineer flicks a bottle so he can drink the floating water "bubbles" as has been so often demonstrated on space-flights—using foot-straps to negotiate around the craft; it's the first instance of a "countdown" to launch (a minor point, but still...).

It's eerily prescient. And one is struck by such scenes as the crew reacting visibly to their first "Earth-set." 

Or maybe not so prescient. Maybe, it's cause and effect. Scientists Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley were advisers to the film, and it was very popular at the German VfR, which counted among its members a young student named Wernher von Braun.

Director Fritz Lang lived long enough to see the first Moon landing in 1969. For real, this time.

* Uh-huh. One of the conspiracy theories I "love" is that we couldn't have gone to the Moon in the 1960's because the technology was so primitive back in those days. By today's standards, sure, but, also, these days out more intricate technologies are much more fragile—go ahead, drop your I-phone, which has more computing power than the Apollo computers had bolted into their control panels. What is true is that, today, we might have the technology to fake a moon landing—but we didn't in the time they occurred.

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933) A man hides in a warehouse that is shaking with the vibrations of heavy machinery in an industrial area of town. Two men come in and open a storage container behind which the man is hiding. The dust and dirt from the lid fall over the hiding man and he involuntarily flinches, exposing his foot behind the container. The two men see it, and while one takes out a black-jack to kosh the fellow, the other urges discretion and they leave the way they came. The hiding man, gun in hand, comes out from his hiding place and listens at the door. The other men are on the other side listening. The man steels his courage, pops a couple pills, takes a swig from a flask, and charges through the door. 

No one is there. He looks around. The coast is clear. He exits the building. Just in time, he throws himself against the building as a slab of concrete falls right where he'd been standing. Alarmed, he runs down the street, only to see three thugs at the end of the block waiting for him. He turns and runs the other direction down an alley. At the end of the alley, two men wait with oil drums. they push one off the truck and it rolls down the street towards our man. He dodges out of the way, just as the drum explodes in a violent explosion that rains fire throughout the alley. 

And that's just the film's first six minutes.

Welcome to the paranoid world of Fritz Lang. It's a world just like ours—but with actual conspiracy theories coming true—and dialed up to "11." Conceived in Germany in its early death-throws between World Wars I and II, when the first war's defeat inspired a dangerously enervating arrogance, Lang used movies to show the best and the worst of societies only too eager to lie to themselves out of some misbegotten quest for power, and it could come from government, from industry, even the motley interests of a lynch mob.

Those were inspired by what was happening in Germany. But, Lang's fantasy instigator was a master racketeer, capable of single-mindedly disrupting the delicate balance of life—Dr. Mabuse. Created in 1921 by the author Norbert Jacques, the Bad Doctor first appeared in a massive two part film project in 1922, then Lang brought him back in a sequel The Testament of Dr, Mabuse, (partially based on an unfinished Jacques novel) even though the previous film had seen the evil manipulator turned mad by the perceived souls of his victims. But, even that cannot stop Mabuse.

All the masterminds of crime you could name—Professor Moriarty, Fu Manchu, Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Hugo Strange, Hannibal Lecter—they don't hold a suddenly-snuffed-out-candle to Mabuse, Fritz Lang's "man behind the curtain," so powerful he can control his vast drug, counterfeiting, terrorism, assassination and extortion rings from his near catatonic state inside a Berlin mental institution, his minions receiving their instructions from a mysterious source, who might be Mabuse himself. 

Lang made three movies about Mabuse--one in 1922 Mabuse, Der Spieler, and in 1960, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, his last directed film. This one, the middle of the trilogy (or actually tetrology if you count "Inferno" as the second chapter of Der Spieler), was made under the unapproving gaze of the Nazis, and subsequently banned by Goebbels, prompting Lang, one of the stellar visionaries of German cinema (M, Metropolis) to flee the country for Hollywood. 

And what a vision it is, reflecting the paranoia of National Socialist Germany. Men are sniped while trapped in traffic jams, or nearly blown to bits with barrels of gasoline thrown down narrow alleyways. Among the plots that Mabuse inflicts are plans for jewelry heists and a long-running counterfeit scheme. But, along the way will be death-traps with no exits and only the inexorable ticking of a hidden bomb, and the sabotage of Mabuse's lab, designed to provide a distraction for the mad man's escape, while the city of Berlin is threatened with a resulting cloud of poison gas. 

Lang even uses the limitations of the film-frame itself to keep you on edge, as lethal chunks of concrete fall from out of frame to threaten those trapped inside it. No one is safe, and little is what it seems in the web that Mabuse spins, even unconsciously. Lang expertly uses double exposures—some almost miraculous ones—to lend a disconcerting bizarreness to the look of the film.

Two men try to stop the mad-man's plot: the personally beleaguered police Commissar Lohmann (Otto Wernicke), who is brought into the madness by the psychological cracking of a former detective, and one of Mabuse's gang, Thomas Kent (Gustav Diessl) who lost his penchant for killing after a stretch in prison and the love of a good woman (Monique Rolland). The men, the authority working outside and the man on the inside, must resolve their own distrust of each other when confronted by an over-arching nemesis, whose power extends even beyond the grave.

One sees in this, the inspirations for Hitchcock and 007 (the film ends with an impressive series of chain-explosions), that not only evolved the thriller genre, but the action film as well. But leave it to Lang to take Mabuse's evil and take it to the next level, a supernatural one, influencing people's minds like a Jedi Master, such is the criminal hypnotist's power. No one's safe, in reality or beyond. 

Now, that is genuine creepiness.