Dr. Mabuse - The Gambler (Der Spieler)

The German cinema of the silent era has seen by many as a wired forecasting of Hitler's rise to power. For it was dominated by a legion of monsters and tyrants-perverted supermen who inhabited a fantasy world that was nevertheless a very recognisable, if distorted, refection of the inflatation -crazy society of Weimar Germany just after the First World War. No film maker dramatised the power-mad criminal of those times better than Fritz Lang. In Dr. Mabuse-The Gambler he fused the thriller elements of Edgar Wallace's novels, which in 1922 were being devoured in a hungry need for post-war escapism, with the awesome road to power that society in dissoution could offer a potential dictator. Dr. Mabuse, the mastermind of crime, played by Rudolf Klien-Rogge, Lang's favourite actor for these 'superman' roles, conceals his identity behind such miscellany of disguises that he seems to be everywhere in society. The weapon he uses to subvert his opponents and control his victims is hypnosis. The world he lives in is often unervingly off-key or askew - the film's brilliant designs are infused with what the critic Lotte Eisner called 'insidous latent life'. They appear to reflect the delirium of characters sleepwalking or fleeing through a society in which vice and passion know no bounds. No bounds, that is, except money. Dr. Mabuse's thirst for power is also a thirst for wealth - and the gambling tables, as big as an entire dance floor, turn him into an automaton of inflationary economy of gain and loss. None of this impedes the swift movement of the thriller - or prevents Lang introducing dozens of grotesquely comic touches to delineate the compulsive gamblers, the gigolos, the black-alley harridans, the fat courtesans and all the other creatures of shadow and light which Carl Hoffmann's luminous photography unites in an atmosphere of uncanny evil and impending doom.