"What do you think of Expressionism, Dr. Mabuse?" It's an odd question, posed at an odd point in an odd film. For an immediate clue as to why
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler is not an Expressionist film in the strictest sense, but rather, a fascinating, prototypical crime thriller incorporating Expressionist elements wherever director
Fritz Lang saw fit, simply look to the subtitles of the two parts.
Part One:
Der grosse Spieler. Ein Bild der Zeit (
The Great Gambler: A Picture of Our Time); and
Part Two:
Inferno. Ein Spiel von Menschen unserer Zeit (
Inferno: A Play About People of Our Time). In a clip from an interview that pops up in
The Story Behind Dr. Mabuse, a 52-minute extra included in
Kino's new "Restored Authorized Edition," Lang suggests that a film ought to have a documentary element to it - a perhaps surprising statement from a director who conjured worlds as fantastical as those of
Die Nibelungen and
Metropolis, but this is very much what his first
Mabuse film is about - it is, above all else, a document of its time.
And what a time. In his biography,
Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, Patrick McGilligan describes the world Lang and Thea von Harbou, his soon-to-be wife and screenwriter, set out to capture, the Berlin of 1922: "The poor scrounged for bread crusts, while private sex clubs proliferated for the privileged class, indulging every whim and predilection. Drugs flooded the streets and were marketed openly in cabarets and nightclubs. Vice bosses and speculators reigned as the new as the new royalty of a city frantically seeking new and ever more gaudy thrills." And Lang knew well "the floor shows of the posh hangouts, the deviant sex clubs, the
Spielclubs (card-playing dens) for jaded women and rich gambling addicts, the hangouts for prostitutes, séances or cocaine. These addresses were part of his nightly routine. Lang himself was addicted to sex and not a little fond of drugs."
The very first words "spoken" in this silent classic come from Dr. Mabuse, one of cinema's most famous criminals, a master of disguise, deception and mind control, as he admonishes Spoerri (
Robert Forster-Larrinaga), the weakling of his tight little gang, for going overboard with the coke. The poor man looks it, too, all wired and drained at the same time. How unusual, though, for Mabuse to insist on moderation in anything. As we first see him here, growling at Spoerri, he's at his famous make-up table, preparing take on two roles in an elaborate scheme in which a courier will be murdered, a document stolen, currency manipulated and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of marks added to Mabuse's already vast holdings. And that's just in the first act; there are around a dozen in all.
Those who know the work of
Rudolf Klein-Rogge at all probably know him as Rotwang, the crazed scientist who brings a robot to life in
Metropolis. Here, we see that his range stretched beyond madmen because
this madman gets a kick out of costumes, beards, wigs, fake noses and he's quite convincing as characters as varied as a banker, a town drunk, a showman, a professor. What's more,
Jack Black can only dream of arching an eyebrow the way Klein-Rogge could. That brow is Dr. Mabuse's most dangerous weapon. The moment it rises, directing attention to the eye, its iris sharply outlined by Lang's lights within the camera's narrow depth of field, we know that Mabuse is beaming those hypnotic powers of his. He uses them most frequently to bend the wills of the rich who, perhaps foolishly, venture into the dens of iniquity for a game of cards.
Anyone who wonders why Mabuse bothers squeezing a few thousand, often more, occasionally even much more from a single sucker when, as we've seen in the first act, he can manipulate the volatile financial markets to score far greater windfalls doesn't wonder long. It's in the film's title; Mabuse lives for the game. What drives him is, in his own phrase, the "will to power." His winnings at the poker table are rarely spent for pleasure (though we do see him celebrate one coup in particular by getting sloshed with his gang); instead, they finance his increasingly complex schemes.
Of course, every Moriarty eventually gets the Sherlock Holmes he deserves, and Mabuse's is Chief Inspector Norbert von Wenck (
Bernhard Goetzke), who may, for contemporary viewers, may be a bit slow to put two and two together, but more than makes up for it with his relentless dedication to putting a stop to this recent mysterious crime wave. Once the game of cat and mouse takes off, the pace and suspense finally pick up, but it has to be said that it does take a while.
Again, back to the subtitles. Part One, the
Picture of Our Time, is all set-up for the far more engaging Part Two, the actual
Spiel (meaning both "Play" and "Game" in German). When the film opened in the summer of 1922, these parts - clocking in at about four-and-a-half hours together - were screened on consecutive nights (an idea that could have made
Kill Bill, say, a terrific weekend-long experience). Even cinephiliacs may find their minds wandering a bit during the first hour or two and will find time to notice things like:
Though, for the sake of universality, the city is never named, it's unmistakably meant to be Berlin (for one thing, workers speak the dialect). And yet it's only in the interiors that any sense of cosmopolitanism comes across. Out on the streets, the city looks downright provincial (and amusingly, Norbert Jacques set his novel, which the film's based on, in Munich; Lang and von Harbou knew right off it'd have to be
Berlin). Even though the dramatic scale of M is relatively intimate, the streets feel like city streets. My hunch: Nine years before M, much of Berlin was still actually that quaint - under the soot.
There's an awful lot of dabbling. Mabuse seems to have picked up a few magic tricks from China and India, for example - a touch of exoticism, signifying nothing more. The suggested link between psychoanalysis (still a relatively new fascination in the early 20s, after all) and Mabuse's clearly supernatural means of mind control remains just that, an un-thought-through suggestion. In a brilliant scene, Mabuse stirs up the prolls, a little revolution meant to serve his own ends, and, rarely seen before this scene, they are never seen again. This sort of messiness, the haphazard grab-bag of curiosities of the day seemingly thrown in for the sake of their modernity, actually contributes, for better and worse, to the film's status as a document of its time, but it's also the sort of ideological sloppiness Lang tolerated in von Harbou (see especially Metropolis), in part because he wasn't particularly politically committed or even engaged himself.
The claim many have made for Mabuse as a foreshadowing of Hitler gives both Lang and von Harbou too much credit. Lang denied the claim as well. The idea of a superhuman rising to power by hypnotizing the masses was simply in the paranoia-stricken air; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a major hit three years before Mabuse, and of course, before Caligari, there was Nietzsche.
Speaking of Caligari, what of Expressionism? For the most part, the sets are realistic and there's little overt play with light and shadow. When elements of the prevailing aesthetic of the day do appear, it's in the interiors - in a spectacular newly opened club, for example, where Lang, seemingly taken himself with the set design, actually moves the camera during a shot, a rarity in this early work. Or inside the home of Count Told (a wonderfully tragic Alfred Abel). He collects art; not only the noble-savage primitive stuff that was still all the rage, but new works by Expressionist artists as well. When Chief Inspector Norbert von Wenck pays a visit, he doesn't know quite what to make of it, and Countess Told, with whom the Inspector is clearly quite taken, assures him she doesn't, either. Both are sympathetic characters; both seem at least slightly amused by the Count's hobby. Was Lang, whose own office was famously a pinnacle of High Modernism in Berlin, encouraging the audience to snicker along? Hard to tell.
When Mabuse drops in - and falls for the Countess as well, setting in motion an especially gruesome scheme that will spell the end of the Count, while at the same time exposing Mabuse's Achilles Heel - he hardly seems to notice the art (though one Expressionist painting of Lucifer almost seems to have taken notice of him). And that's when, practically out of the blue, Count Told poses his question: "What do you think of Expressionism, Dr. Mabuse?"
It's all Spielerei, Mabuse scoffs. Fiddling around. A game. A moment's pause, and then: "But why not? Everything's a game these days."
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