Dr Mabuse vs Scotland Yard (1963)

Fritz Lang's Dr Mabuse - The Gambler, has been a sensation in 1922. It was a film that created several entirely new genres and introduced the diabolical criminal mastermind to cinema.  Lang made a sequel in the early 1930s and a second (excellent) sequel in 1960, The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse. The latter was so successful in Europe that it kicked off a whole series of Dr Mabuse movies. None are as good as Lang’s film but all are fun and all are worth seeing. Dr Mabuse vs Scotland Yard (Scotland Yard jagt Dr. Mabuse) is no exception.

The evil Dr Mabuse is up to his old tricks again. Which is surprising, since he’s dead. But to a diabolical criminal mastermind as cunning as Dr Mabuse death is merely a setback. Even when dead he is most definitely still a very formidable adversary.

This time Dr Mabuse has got his hands on a fiendish brain-control device. Hidden inside a camera it can project a hypnotic ray that turns people into robotic slaves. Dr Mabuse intends to use the device to take over Britain.

This movie is supposedly based on a Bryan Edgar Wallace story so it’s part-krimi and part Dr Mabuse movie, set partly in Germany and partly in Britain. Inspektor Vulpius (Werner Peters) from Hamburg and Major Bill Tern (Peter van Eyck) from Scotland Yard are both investigating the case. Major Tern has the assistance of his mother who is a detective story fan and a bit of an amateur detective. Also on the case is Inspector Joe Wright (Klaus Kinski).

Dr Mabuse is making use of a renegade English scientist who has been given plastic surgery to disguise his identity, and his plans include kidnapping princess Diana (no, not that one, a different one).

It seems that Dr Mabuse may succeed this time since he is able to turn Scotland Yard’s own men against them. Even the indefatigable Inspector Joe Wright finds himself robotised. Is there no answer to this horrible weapon? Perhaps there is. Major Tern’s mother is immune. If Major Tern can just figure out why, he may have a chance. And one other man is immune also - is there a link? Can the answer be found before Dr Mabuse takes over the British government?

As usual with krimis the acting is pretty good. Peter van Eyck makes a good hero. Klaus Kinski is surprisingly heroic, at least until he gets robotised. Wolfgang Priess is an excellent super-villain. As usual the British police are armed to the teeth, although it appears that guns are of little use against such a super-weapon.

Paul May had already had a very long career as a director and he handles matters fairly confidently.

There’s no need for any expensive special effects which is just as well since there was no way that the very limited budget was possibly going to extend that far anyway.

Sinister Cinema’s DVD-R release offers only a fullframe print with an English dubbed soundtrack but picture quality is quite acceptable and it appears to be the only option for non-German speaking audiences.

Dr Mabuse is one of the screen’s greatest villains and fans of the evil doctor will want to check out this installment in his infamous criminal career. Dr Mabuse vs Scotland Yard will not disappoint them.

Death Ray Mirror of Dr Mabuse (1964)

The Death Ray Mirror of Dr Mabuse (also know as The Death Ray of Dr Mabuse, Die Todesstrahlen des Dr. Mabuse) was the last of the main cycle of Dr Mabuse films. Released in 1964, it’s usually considered to be the weakest film in the cycle. Perhaps it was the fact that my expectations were very low, but I thought it was rather enjoyable. It’s true that it doesn’t quite have the feel of a real Dr Mabuse film. Producer Artur Brauner was trying to jump on the James Bond bandwagon, and it’s more of a lightweight spy movie, with less of the darkness and paranoia of previous films. It tries to be sexy and fun, and it succeeds reasonably well. Peter van Eyck plays a secret agent (Major Anders) investigating a plot to steal a deadly death ray mirror, a weapon so powerful that could destroy the world. Just the sort of thing that a diabolical criminal mastermind like Mabuse would like to get his hands on. The death ray is the brainchild of the eccentric genius Professor Larsen, and he keeps it in a laboratory underneath the island of Malta, a laboratory so secure that non-one, not even Professor Larsen himself, has the combination to the door. The explanation of how he can gain access to the laboratory without actually knowing the combination is one of the cleverer things about the movie. He has an enigmatic assistant, a Dr Krishna, and naturally he has a beautiful daughter (all eccentric genius scientists have beautiful daughters for the hero to fall in love with). Major Anders sets off for Malta, and in order to provide a cover story for himself he takes along the beautiful Judy to pose as his girlfriend. Judy takes her role quite seriously, and spends much of the movie wearing very little clothing and trying to entice Major Anders into bed. The eccentric genius scientist’s beautiful daughter (Gilda) seems equally keen to get better acquainted with our noble hero. The plot becomes fairly convoluted, with an army of killer frogmen and with chess playing a major role. After a mysterious gunman starts taking potshots at the major it is decided that Judy (who is actually enjoying playing at being a super spy) needs to be placed somewhere safe, and what better place to keep her out of harm’s way than a brothel? It’s all very silly, but it doesn’t take itself seriously and if you accept it for what it is, an insubstantial piece of harmless fun, then it’s quite entertaining. It’s certainly nowhere near as bad as most reviewers would have you believe. Its main weakness is the casting, with most of the wonderful character actors like Gert Fröbe who made the earlier movies so enjoyable missing from this one. Peter van Eyck does a solid job, while Yvonne Furneaux is competent as Gilda and Rika Dialina is amusing as the enthusiastic and somewhat amorous Judy. This movie is one of the three included in the Image Entertainment/Retromedia Dr Mabuse Collection, along with The Return of Dr Mabuse and The Invisible Dr Mabuse. Considering its cheapness the set is extremely good value and it’s a lot of fun.

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960)

By the late 1950s Fritz Lang was finding his career as a Hollywood director both more difficult and less rewarding, and with the Hollywood system changing as the studio system declined he was finding it hard to adapt. So when German producer Artur Brauner tried to tempt him to return to Germany to direct Lang was more than willing to do so. He made his last three movies in Germany, the very last being The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse), made in 1960. This was more than just a return to the subject master of his early German movies (he’d made two films about the notorious super-criminal Dr Mabuse in the 20s and 30s). As much as I like Lang’s Hollywood movies (and I like them a good deal) I can’t help feeling that that The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse was also a return to the real Lang. Like the earlier Mabuse films it’s a mix of science fiction, spy movie and crime film and it makes fewer concession to realist cinema than his American films. It opens in stunning fashion, with a visually dazzling traffic scene involving the murder of a man in a car, intercut with scenes in police headquarters and scenes of a mysterious psychic predicting the murder. It’s disorienting and misleading, and it sets the tone for the whole movie. Nothing we see is really as it appears to be, the characters are not who we think they are, the relationships between people and events are not what we suppose them to be. We’ve entered a world of illusion, paranoia and conspiracy, and while Dr Mabuse speads his web of deceit over the characters in the movie Fritz Lang is entangling the viewer in a similar web of deceit. We’re presented with a wealthy handsome American hero, and we see him save the life of a unfortunate woman who has been drive to attempt suicide. We meet the detective chief, Kriminalkommissar Kras, the enigmatic blind clairvoyant Cornelius, the smooth-talking psychiatrist Dr Jordan, a buffooonish insurance salesman who rejoices in the name of Hieronymus B. Mistelzweig, the beautiful and tragic Marion Meril, and the sinister assassin known simply as Number 12. We gradually piece together the connections between these characters, but our assumptions are entirely wrong. And the assumptions the characters make about each other are equally mistaken. We know there is some very large-scale plot afoot, with international repercussions, and we (and Kriminalkommissar Kras) soon come to the conclusion that the shadowy presence of the evil Dr Mabuse is behind it all. The only problem with that theory is that Dr Mabuse has been dead for 30 years. But the touch of Dr Mabuse is unmistakeable. Most of the movie takes place in the luxurious Hotel Luxor in Berlin. This hotel was based on an actual hotel built by the Nazis during the war (not just built under the Nazi regime but actually built specifically for the purposes of the Gestapo). Lang had read about this hotel and had been fascinated by it, and it becomes a leading character in the movie in its own right (and it eventually offers the explanation for the title of the film). If the identities of the characters are shifting and misleading, their motivations are even more ambiguous, and even more questionable. The movie was a low-budget affair but Lang, relishing the freedom from the constraints under which he had always had to work in Hollywood, really lets himself go. It’s a bravura directing performance. The multi-national cast is composed of experienced and extremely competent performers, with Dawn Addams as Marion and Gert Fröbe as Kras especially good, while Howard Vernon (a very familiar face to fan of European cult movies) makes the most of his small role as Number 12. Karl Löb’s black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous. The DVD from Allday Entertainment, released through Image, is magnificent and packed with extras.Which is just as well - the film is so complex that you really need to listen to the commentary track and watch the featurette. This was Lang’s final masterpiece, and it’s a dazzling achievement by one of the giants of cinema. It’s also an insanely entertaining movie.

The Invisible Dr Mabuse (1962)

The Invisible Dr Mabuse (1962) is one of the many many sequels to Fritz Lang’s original 1922 silent classic Dr Mabuse The Gambler. That film was not only a masterpiece of German Expressionism, it was directly and indirectly an influence on the development of countless movie genres - the film noir, the spy film, the science fiction film and the mystery thriller. Dr Mabuse became a legendary figure, a German equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis Professor Moriarty, an evil genius sitting like a malevolent spider at the centre of a web of deception and corruption. No matter how many times it seemed that Dr Mabuse had finally been destroyed, he just kept coming back for the next sequel. The Mabuse movies, like the Edgar Wallace krimis with which they had much in common, were a staple of the German film industry in the 60s.

The Invisible Dr Mabuse has everything you’d expect in a Mabuse film and more. It has the great diabolical criminal mastermind himself, an evil clown, a top-secret scientific project of such importance that the fate of civilisation is at stake, a mad scientist, a beautiful actress, glamorous showgirls, unlikely gadgetry and some of the most gloriously silly technobabble ever committed to celluloid. The plot involves Operation X, an ingenious scientific invention that allows light beams to pass through the gaps between particles of matter, thus making an object (or person) effectively invisible. FBI agent Joe Como has battled Dr Mabuse before, and is convinced that he is still alive and plotting to get his hands on this invention. The FBI and the German authorities believe that Mabuse is dead, but Joe Como can recognise a Dr Mabuse plot when he sees one.

The cast includes plenty of faces that will be familiar to fans of 1960s German movies of this type, with Lex Barker as Joe Como, Karin Dor as the beautiful actress involved with the mad scientist, and Wolfgang Preiss playing two different roles. Harald Reinl had plenty of experience directing this type of movie and keeps the action moving along nicely. It’s not as good as the previous year’s The Return of Dr Mabuse but it’s still a great deal of fun.

The Return of Dr Mabuse (1961)

With his 1922 movie Dr Mabuse, der Spieler Fritz Lang created one of the enduring villains of 20th century cinema. The shadowy figure of Dr Mabuse was to appear in several more of Lang’s films, including his final film The 1000 Eyes Of Dr Mabuse, and in moves by countless other directors. Like a diabolical spider, Dr Mabuse sits in the middle of a gigantic web of corruption and criminal conspiracies. Dr Mabuse enjoyed a renaissance in early 1960s German films. The Return of Dr Mabuse (Im Stahlnetz des Dr Mabuse) opens with a series of murders, apparently related to large-scale international organised crime activities. At first Commissioner Lohmann (Gert Fröbe) has no reason to suspect Dr Mabuse’s involvement – Mabuse is, after all, dead. It soon becomes apparent, however, that this is no ordinary criminal plot. He is up against an army of men who have been turned into virtual robots, with no will of their own, mindless and remorselessly carrying out their orders. The plot also seems to go beyond mere crime. It’s exactly what you’d expect from Dr Mabuse. But Dr Mabuse is dead. Isn’t he? Then Lohmann discovers the charred remains of a book at one of the murder scenes, where a notorious female mobster from Chicago has been assassinated by means of a flame-thrower concealed in a truck. The book, by a mysterious clergyman, mentions Mabuse by name. Lohmann is more and more convinced that the evil doctor is somehow involved. He is also starting to wonder if the FBI agent who is assisting him in the investigation is really who he says he is. And is there a connection with the city prison’s strange inability to account for some of its more notorious inmates?

The movie has more than enough energy and style to overcome the limitations of its low budget. Gert Fröbe is delightful as Commissioner Lohmann, Lex Barker is solid as FBI man Joe Como, and Daliah Lavi adds some glamour as a nosy reporter. There’s also a mad scientist, so really this film has everything you could want. It’s all terrific fun. It’s a bit similar in feel to the Edgar Wallace krimis that were such a staple of the German film industry in the 60s. I’m getting totally hooked on the German movies of this period.