Watch Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler For Free

Please don't spend money on this.

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Following their ruinous defeat during the War, Germany found itself in what is now commonly referred to as the Weimar era. It's a uniquely fascinating point in the country's history dominated by a stark contrast between impoverished casualties of war and lavishly wealthy benefactors soaking in aloof decadence. This divide between societal poles was not exactly one unlikely to be crossed by any daring enough to grab a boat and travel the uncertain waters however, and director Fritz Lang frequently visits this idea throughout his first major feature film still highly regarded to this day. Bouncing back and forth between seedy gangsters, the hoity-toity elite and those unfortunate enough to be tasked with keeping everything in order (the law), Lang embellishes his film with a unique and varied palette of both character and tone for its time. Based on the novel Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler by Norbert Jacques, the story follows psychoanalyst-by-day, underground-criminal-mastermind- by-night Dr. Mabuse as he manipulates his way up the rungs of society seemingly with ease through various nefarious means including stock market manipulation and psychological mind-control during card games at high-profile gambling joints. The central theme here warns of granting overwhelming dominance through terror and misdirection at the hands of a charismatic megalomaniac misleading an already misled and fractured society; a warning that evidently fell on deaf ears before the eventual rise of the national socialists a little more than decade later, at which point Lang promptly packed his bags and headed for the States. While at its heart The Gambler may simply be something of a proto-noir gangster movie with light fantasy elements, lurking somewhere in the foreboding shadows that dominate most the film's sets is a thinly-veiled socio-political commentary that can—for the most part—be a fascinating and engrossing thriller all at the same time.Mabuse is played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, best known these days as Rotwang the Inventor from Lang's most famous film Metropolis released five years following The Gambler. While his performance in the science-fiction epic is limited but nevertheless memorable, it's a true delight to see him take center stage here as he delivers an iconic performance of the mad-but-brilliant Dr. Mabuse. As one of the character's central traits is psychological manipulation which he delivers through various fictional guises to further distract his victims, Klein-Rogge is given plenty of room to jump between personas which vary between the bizarre and ruthlessly callous, all of which he excels in bringing to life vividly. Supporting actors and actresses back up the leading man well, specifically Alfred Abel (also of limited Metropolis fame) and Gertrude Welcker who together play a husband and wife soon at the mercy of Mabuse's twisted puppeteer hands. Bernhard Goetzke is fine as State prosecutor Norbert von Wenk, but his character sticks too closely to convention to make him stand out as anything more than a pawn serving as the plot's catalyst to chug along with its rich character drama.Those who have seen Metropolis and are less familiar with Lang's earlier works may be surprised or disappointed by the director's more restrained approach to expressionist sets and effects here in The Gambler. While his contemporaries at the time, Murnau (Nosferatu) and Wiene (Caligari), had fervently adopted the popular art movement in their respective films from the early 20s, Lang was still something of a critic and instead opted to lightly season Mabuse, rather than to glaze it every 15 minutes. Nevertheless, much of the film's most memorable and compelling moments arise from these experiments in expressionism that often mirror the film's otherwise dark and brooding atmosphere with surreal imagery that conveys the characters' inner madness, isolation, torment and despair. It's no wonder then that Lang would go on to make Die Nibelungen and Metropolis, each one more expressionist and surreal than the last.So having said all that, it must also be noted that The Gambler is somewhere near 270 minutes long. What I've highlighted above are areas where around two-thirds of that runtime fully take advantage of what Mabuse has to offer. The other third is more problematic and occurs mostly during its middle section where the cat-and-mouse game between Mabuse and Norbert von Wenk goes around in circles. Though there are highlights here and there, a long stretch of 90 or so minutes occurs that feels like it could have been chopped down to 30 without much consequence other than to make the pace of the film easier to digest. And yes, I know the movie is in fact a two-part deal, but the fact that this means the first movie's ending is lacklustre and the second movie's opening lacks the enthralling immediacy of its predecessor doesn't change anything and still hurts an otherwise well-paced film.Dr. Mabuse's first outing on the big screen is for the most part a rewarding and compelling experience, but nevertheless presents the viewer with a challenging middle half that tugs along lethargically rather than with the brisk pace that bookends the feature. However frustrating this section can be however, The Gambler remains as a feature that does a lot well and very little poorly. And thanks to a wonderfully memorable performance by Klein-Rogge backed up by an equally haunting atmosphere, rich cast of diverse characters and otherwise thrilling plot, Fritz Lang's 1922 testament to Germany's Weimar era is a captivating classic, not without its flaws, but also not one to be overlooked either.

Arch-criminal Dr. Mabuse sets out to make a fortune and run Berlin. Detective Wenk sets out to stop him.Easily what could be called an epic, coming in at around four and a half hours... this silent era film puts even Peter Jackson to shame. Fritz Lang is obviously one of the giants of cinema, both German and American, silent and with sound. This is one of his that deserves to be seen by all even if it tests our patience a bit (free up an afternoon or two).Some could debate that Lang was the greatest director in German silent cinema, and I think that is a position that could be defended. His obvious opponent is Murnau, but Lang has the advantage of longevity.

It is interesting to discover or rediscover Fritz Lang. He was well known for one film, Metropolis, and then for a few American films, films he shot in the USA. But the full set of Dr Mabuse's films is fascinating in a way because it provides a rare vision on the German cinema from the early 1920s to 1960. The eye looking at the world from a German point of view that spans over Hitler, Nazism and the Second World War is Fritz Lang's. We know him for his highly symbolical Metropolis in which the meaning is built by visual and numerical symbols. In this Dr Mabuse it is different. There are quite a lot of symbols but inherited from the silent cinema of the old days, symbols that are there only to make clear a situation that had been depicted previously with pictures and no words, or a page of intertitles. Fritz Lang still uses that technique in his 1960 film, which is a long time overdue for a silent cinema technique. But that is a style, nothing but a way of speaking, not a meaning. The meaning is absolutely bizarre. Dr Mabuse is a highly criminal person but his objective is not to commit crimes in order to get richer or whatever. It is to control the world through his criminal activity. The world is seen as basically negative, leading to chaos and overexploitation, leading to anarchistic crime and nothing else because the only objective of this modern world is to make a profit by all means available. Dr Mabuse is a master mind of his time and for him crime is the only way to destroy that capitalistic world that he never calls capitalistic or Kapitalismus and to replace it with pure chaos that should be able to bring a regeneration, a rejuvenating epiphany, a re-founding experience. We find in his mind what we could find in some of the most important criminal minds in this world, like Carlos in France, or Charles Manson in the USA, or those sects that practice mass suicide in order to liberate the suicidees and to warn the world about the coming apocalypse. It is the mind and thinking of those who practice war as a revolutionary activity with a fundamentalist vision of their religions or politics and the world that is supposed to reflect that religion. They do not want to build a different society and when they are in power they are constantly aiming at antagonizing their own population and the world because they cannot exist if they do not feel some opposition that they can negate, bring down, crush, like in Iran, or in Germany with Hitler, though later on it was not much different under the Communists in East Germany. These visions need opposition to exist and they provoke that opposition by aiming at taking the control of the world with violence and imposing their control with more violence. That's Dr Mabuse, the main brain of a criminal decomposition and re-composition of society on an absolutely antagonistic vision of life. But that vision is very common. Just as common as this phrase "a half full glass is nothing but a half empty glass". Add antagonism to that dual vision and then you have a struggle to the death between the half empty glass that wants to be full and the half full glass that wants to be empty (or full?), one half only wanting to take what the other half has and impose his half to the other half to make the world one by the elimination of the other side of the coin. That dual antagonistic vision is the popular and shrivelled up approach of the communist catechism of Stalin, inherited from Marx's French son in law Paul Lafargue, or of course in all dictatorship that reduces life to a little red book, to one hundred quotations from the master thinker of the revolution. That's the world you feel in these films. Fritz Lang embodies this ideology of the mentally poor in that criminal character of his: kill, rob, steal, counterfeit. Even if you die when doing so, the world will change and remember. The master criminal has to die in his activity in order to regenerate the world. What Fritz Lang introduced in his double main feature of the early 1920s and in his Testament, is that the master brain of this vision internalizes this paranoid and psychotic vision of the world into himself and has to become psychotic himself and it is in his psychosis that he finds the energy to conquer the world again. In the third film, Dr Mabuse has been dead for a long time and is reincarnated by someone who finds his inspiration in the doctor. That is a far-fetched cinematographic and fictional antic that is necessary as a reference but brings nothing to the vision itself. A few years later that ideology was to conquer our imagination in many ways. First the Berlin Wall became the symbol of that vision the way it was carried and conveyed to the world by the East-German communists. Then we have to think of the various revolutionary movements like Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, Die Rote Armee Fraktion, to take some German examples. But think of the French Mesrine and the Italian revolutionary urban guerrilla warfare movements and you will have a fair picture of this psychotic criminal mind copied and pasted into the political field. The Maoist Red Guard and Cultural Revolution movement was quite typical of this approach. All that was going to come in 1960 and we must admit Fritz Lang was seeing ahead of his time, just as he had seen Hitler in his Testament of Dr Mabuse: a political leader based on hypnosis and mesmerizing people into blindly following a band of criminals.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler (1922) *** 1/2 (out of 4) Part one of Fritz Lang's epic two part series as Dr. Mabuse making a potion that will allow him to rob people at the card table but soon one of his former victims and the State Attorney are hot on his trail. Needless to say, this thing is masterfully directed by Lang who builds the perfect underworld and allows a really beautiful and exciting film to take place. The cinematography is also brilliant and the performances are nice as well. There's a bit of a dry spot towards the end but the climax is perfectly executed to make way for part two.Dr. Mabuse: King of Crime (1922) *** (out of 4) Part two of Lang's epic has Dr. Mabuse slowly coming unraveled. I found the first part of the film to be more entertaining overall but the ending to this part can't be topped as it shows Lang in an early stage doing something that would later be seen in M. The ending inside the tunnel and the follow up of Mabuse being "haunted" contains terrific atmosphere and manages to be quite creepy as well. However, the first part of this film really drags in spots mainly because the camera is taken off Mabuse and centers on the other characters, none of which are as interesting as Mabuse. With the two films running nearly four-hours, Lang manages to make a very impressive epic, although some of this could have used some editing.