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.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold

Over Christmas, I had great fun reading "A Legacy of Spies," the new novel by John le Carre. In it, the events of le Carre's earlier book "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" come back to haunt the British Secret Service—The Circus, as le Carre dubbed it—as those who are still living are sued by living relatives for damages incurred by the events of the story. Is it some Russian plot? No. It is mere gold-digging. The plaintiffs are blackmailing the Service to reveal what they know...or suspect...if they are not payed handsomely. It is always fun for me to read le Carre but the nostalgia factor of coming back to the old characters, even if in passing, was a bit of a thrill. And whenever Alec Leamas was mentioned in the book, I still had trouble imagining Richard Burton's face and manner. I wrote this in 2011, some time before Tomas Alfredson's excellent version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy reached theaters—I should post my review of that here when I'm done with the clutch of Holiday released movies.

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965) With the anticipation of the Christmas release of a film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, it would do well to revisit the world of George Smiley, "Control," and the duplicity of agent-turned-novelist John le Carré's "kitchen-sink" version of spies. Although Smiley and the others would loom large in his later novels (especially the "Karla Trilogy"), they're mere background characters in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, the focus of the tale being operative Alec Leamas (Richard Burton), former head of the West Berlin branch of "The Circus," who must go behind enemy lines—in fact, one of the toughest of them, the Berlin Wall—as a potential "mole"* to ferret out who, among their Cold War equivalency on the other side, might be a double agent for the Soviets, the one who is responsible for the death of one of Leamas' contacts. To "Control" (Cyrilm Cusack), the head of "The Circus"  it is a rare opportunity to do some damage control and, possibly, if they can take advantage of an agency power-struggle, some harm. 

His identity is kept the same—The Circus wants Leamas and his background history out in the open—but he is demoted in rank and stature, and, depressed and drinking heavily, he becomes bait for Soviet recruitment to betray information. That's the mission, become a decoy on the "inside," another "double" feeding the Soviets false information, while trying to find out if there's a player on the other side in The Circus feeding information to the Russians.** 

Oh, what a tangled web the Cold War weaves.

Taken to East Berlin, Leamas is interrogated by a suspicious Russian administrator named Fiedler (Oskar Werner) who (rightly) suspects Leamas of being a "plant." Fiedler suspects a British "mole" already underground in the Soviet service and so sweats Leamas for any information to discover who that might be. Ultimately, Leamas is undone by what so many of le Carré's heroes or anti-heroes are susceptible to, the warmth of human contact—a failing that trips up a lot of the author's protagonists. Leamas "comes out of the cold," the world of spies, and his friends, relations or lovers—the thread of decency and honesty they provide—are used against him.

For the fact of the matter is the Spymasters of "The Circus" are cold-hearted bastards ("without sympathy" as "Control," played by Cyril Cusack, ponders)—they have to be to combat their enemies—and they're just as capable of betraying their own as those they fight.  

Case in point: George Smiley (played here by Rupert Davies). He would become le Carré's most celebrated character, but here he's a bit of a functionary, and he's just as cold-hearted as the rest. In the "Tinker, Tailor..." timeline, "Control" was long since dead, having been driven out by "the new broom" from his station, which had left him suspicious and paranoid (ultimately with good reason) with Smiley his only trusted colleague. 

When the BBC made a television mini-series of "Tinker...", Smiley was famously played by Sir Alec Guinness and (as le Carré amusingly notes in his new forward to "Tinker, Tailor...,") because of that he "lost control" of the character. But Smiley (however sympathetically Guinness played him) is also a "cold-hearted bastard"—if he wasn't, he wouldn't have lost the vital clue that was exploited by his enemies. He gives as bad as he gets, and, even at his most triumphant, takes little joy in what he does.

Davies as George Smiley in The Spy...

In such a world, Ritt's direction is entirely appropriate—low-key, almost documentary in feel on the streets of London—in drab black-and-white, not the high-contrast color of other spy films of the era. There is nothing glamorous about it, and the circumstances play out slowly and subtly—in fact, after a debriefing by his boss, the shift in tone is so dreary one suspects one is watching a different film. It is part and parcel of the subterfuge—it works on us as it does for Leamas' Sov' recruiters (most prominently Michael Hordern).

And the script—now there's an interesting tale. A beginning draft was written by Hollywood veteran Guy Trosper, who died subsequently. Taking over was poet-playwright Paul Dehn. Dehn had written the final polish on the James Bond spy film Goldfinger (amusingly, as the two films could not be more polar opposite), and was the mainstay-writer for the "Planet of the Apes" sequels. But, Dehn knew the world of spies well—during the second World War, Major Paul Dehn was the "Political Warfare" officer at the BSC training headquarters "Camp X" (where among the trainees were Roald Dahl and Bond creator Ian Fleming). *** Dehn was well-versed in spy-craft, deceit, and keeping secrets and his distillation of le Carré's novel brings the moral duplicity to the fore, while keeping the audience guessing on whose side is whom.

If the film has one flaw, it is the casting of Burton as Leamas. Burton was too good, too charismatic an actor/star to play a functionary like Leamas (it's about the same as "buying" Sean Connery as a spy (which was part of the joke of the Bond series)—he's someone you'd notice walking into a room, and thus, hardly spy material. But, Burton's presence, no doubt, got the film made, so the point is a bit moot. Still, if its ideas and mysteries of the State and the heart you want more than action and fireballs (shall we say if you want to be "stirred and not shaken?"), The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is a fine, bracing tonic.

Smiley's before they were emoji's: Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman

* The term "mole" is a le Carré invention—his spy-circles code-name for a double agent hiding in plain sight within one of the other spy agencies, Soviet or British, and relaying information to "the other side."

** There has been a rich history of double agents throughout the annals of spy-dom, the most significant of which were "The Cambridge Five"—Kim Philby, Donald Duart Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and a fifth (and possibly more)—who'd been recruited during their college years, passed information to the Russians during WWII, and subsequently during the post-War years through the early 1950's. "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" (and the other two of the le Carré "Karla" novels) and le Carré's subsequent "A Perfect Spy" are inspired by "The Five" and their Russian puppet-master.

*** And, interestingly, one of the people who asked, and was briefly considered, to run Camp X...was Kim Philby!

The Wages of Fear

The Wages of Fear  (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1952) Some movies are so good they defy time, place and stay universally fresh, seemingly like they were made yesterday. Clouzot's The Wages of Fear is that kind of movie, and I would call it the best film of 2007 if it was released today instead of 1952. It tells the story of four vagrants (played by Yves Montand, Charles Vanel, Folco Lulli, and Peter Van Eyck) scratching out a living in a remote South American village existing in the shadow (and under the thumb) of an American oil company. 

One of their distant oil rigs goes up in flames, and these four are hired to drive two trucks of nitro-glycerin over unforgiving roads to the inferno to snuff it out. Why take on this task? The answer is simple: $2,000 per man--enough money for each to fly out and make a new life. Why these particular four? They're not union workers, for one thing, and should they die—and the odds are fifty/fifty (hence the two trucks)—they have no families who might sue or require compensation for their loss.

It's a neat little corporate trap, with a limited financial freedom as the prize, and that doesn't cover the obstacles that Nature (and uncaring road-workers!) have along the way. All these desperate times call for desperate measures and the efforts taken can be undone in the blink of an eye, or a flash of fire. For the four, the journey strips them down to their real selves, all pretense and masks disappear in the face of impossible challenges that must be overcome, with the looming threat of annihilation riding behind them. The wages of fear may be death, but The Wages of Fear is a bleak metaphor for life itself.

All of this is played out over a blasted landscape, the results of the presence of Big Oil, and the journey feels like going back through time as well as space, through the spare white jail-bars of a denuded forest, back to the primordial ooze and finally ending up in Hell. By the end one can't help wonder if the fate of Nature and the nature of Fate are intertwined. Except for one fairly amateurish performance this is a near-perfect movie.