2012 Movie Challenge #1: Dr. Mabuse der Spieler

Note: This is one of the more obscure and difficult movies on the list and there's no chance in hell that you're ever going to watch it, so you might as well skip this post and wait for the next one.

Dr, Mabuse der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler) is a two-part epic thriller, made in Germany and released in 1922. The plot revolves around the sinister & mysterious Dr. Mabuse, a psychopathic psychoanalyst who lives a double life as a master criminal and gambler. He is a kidnapper, counterfeiter, stock market manipulator, and master of disguise who toys with the lives of others through the power of hypnosis and mind control. 

I first saw Dr. Mabuse der Spieler in college twenty years ago. I was taking a class on the golden era of German silent film, and it was one of the first movies we watched. I really enjoyed it, and I remember being surprised at how entertaining it was for a movie that was almost seventy years old. I wrote one of my papers on the film, re-watching it and taking notes, and if anything I enjoyed it even more the second time through. The paper turned out really well, and by the end of it all I too had fallen under Dr. Mabuse's hypnotic spell. I became so fascinated with the film that its story took on the quality of a myth for me, except instead of gods and minotaurs there were bombs and gambling dens and car chases. I made my own copy from the AV department's dark, grainy tape, and over the years I would bring it back out when I was in one of my film geek moods or I wanted to recapture some feeling of my bygone college days. 

What's particularly neat about the movie, I think, is that it features an early instance of the classic "supervillain" idea, but with a twist. Dr. Mabuse is a bit different from your garden-variety evil overlord in that he doesn't want to take over the world, he wants to set it on fire and laugh as it burns. He is a grim, determined anarchist, and who doesn't love a good anarchist? Movies have also taught us that supervillains are always ice-cold and as stolid as snakes, but Mabuse is not quite that. We see him seethe with lust and malice; he holds drunken orgies in his moments of triumph and explodes with rage when thwarted. Though he has the mind of a genius, he is also a man, and a pretty loopy one at that. 

The movie is also fascinating to me because it represents a huge step forward in filmmaking art. Mabuse has an incredible kinetic energy and confidence in its storytelling for its time; D.W. Griffith's 1919 film Broken Blossoms is practically like watching a painting in comparison. There is also a famous (possibly apocryphal) story that the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein was so impressed by the film that he obtained a copy, cut it up into its constituent shots, and then put it back together to better understand how it worked, much in the same way that a student mechanic might take apart a motor and reassemble it. Luis Buñuel was also an admirer.

How did it hold up? I enjoyed it, like always; it's interesting from a historical perspective, there's lots of neat camerawork, and whenever I watch it, it feels like I'm revisiting an old friend. The question is, is it a movie I'd recommend to other people? Well...certainly I would say that it's important viewing for film scholars. For the average moviegoer, though...no. Definitely there is great stuff in there that anyone would enjoy, but the film is four and a half hours long and silent, and even if it was faster-paced than any other film of its day, it's still going to feel draggy to a modern audience. 

Netflixxable? Yes, but it looks like they have the Image version, which is not nearly as good as the Kino on Video version.