The Complete Fritz Lang MABUSE Boxset

Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler.

Fritz Lang, 1922

One of the legendary epics of the silent cinema — and the first part of a trilogy that Fritz Lang developed up to the very end of his career — Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler. [Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler.] is a masterpiece of conspiracy that, even as it precedes the mind-blowing Spione from the close of Lang’s silent cycle, constructs its own dark labyrinth from the base materials of human fear and paranoia.

Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays Dr. Mabuse, the criminal mastermind whose nefarious machinations provide the cover for — or describe the result of — the economic upheaval and social bacchanalia at the heart of Weimar-era Berlin. Initiated with the arch-villain’s diabolical manipulation of the stock-market, and passing through a series of dramatic events based around hypnotism, charlatanism, hallucinations, Chinese incantations, cold-blooded murder, opiate narcosis and cocaine anxiety, Lang’s film maintains an unrelenting power all the way to the final act… which culminates in the terrifying question: “WHERE IS MABUSE?!”

A bridge between Feuillade’s somnambulistic serial-films and modern media-narratives of elusive robber-barons, Lang’s two-part classic set the template for the director’s greatest works: social commentary as super-psychology, poised at the brink of combustion. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Lang’s early triumph in its fully-restored version with new English subtitles.

Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse

Fritz Lang, 1933

With the etching onto glass of a single word — “MABUSE” — Berlin reawakens into a nightmare. Fritz Lang’s electrifying Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse [The Testament of Dr. Mabuse] is the astonishing second instalment in the German master’s legendary trilogy, a film that puts image and sound into an hypnotic arrangement unlike anything seen or heard in the cinema ever before — or since.

It’s been eleven years since the downfall of arch-criminal and master-of-disguise Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), now sequestered in a room of an asylum under the watchful eye of one Professor Baum (Oskar Beregi). Mabuse exists in a state of ‘catatonic graphomania’, his only action the irrepressible scribbling of blueprints that would realise a seemingly theoretical “Empire of Crime”. But when a series of violent events courses through the city, police and populace alike start asking themselves with increasing panic: “Who is behind all this?!” The answer borders on the realm of the Impossible…

Not only a follow-up to Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler., but also, with the presence of Otto Wernicke’s Police Commissioner Lohmann, a semi-sequel to Lang’s immortal masterpiece M, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse is itself considered by many to be Lang’s greatest achievement — a work of terrible and practically supernatural power that, like Renoir’s La Règle du jeu, seems to have prophesied the implications of the Nazi scourge… and the entirety of the 20th Century. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse fully-restored and with new English subtitles.

Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse

Fritz Lang, 1960

After enjoying fantastic success with Fritz Lang’s two-part “Indian Epic” in 1959, the German producer Artur Brauner signed the great director to direct one more film. The result would be the picture that, in closing the saga he began nearly forty years earlier, brought Lang’s career full-circle, and would come to represent his final celluloid testament — by extension: his final film masterpiece.

Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse [The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse] finds that diabolical Weimar name resurfacing in the Cold War era, linked now to the actions of a criminal gang whose methodology — executed by, among others, the bug-eyed “No. 12” (portrayed by Howard Vernon, of Melville’s Le Silence de la mer and Godard’s Alphaville) — resembles that of the same villainous mastermind who gripped Berlin with his menace in the years preceding Hitler. Séances, assassinations, and Nazi-engineered surveillance-tech — all abound in Lang’s paranoid, and ultimate, filmic labyrinth.

One of the great and cherished “last films” in the history of cinema, Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse provides a stylistic glimpse into the ’60s works on such subjects as sex-crime, youth-culture, and LSD that Lang would unfortunately never come to realise. Nonetheless: deemed “masterly … lively, spontaneous, thrilling” by Lotte Eisner, and described by Roger Greenspun as asking from its audience “both greater innocence and infinitely greater sophistication than most of us bring to the movies nowadays,” Lang’s final film remains an explosive, and definitive, closing statement. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Fritz Lang’s Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse in its fully-restored version for the first time in the UK.