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Such a frustrating disappointment

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

You don't believe in occult forces? Neither in life beyond death? You haven't heard of Dr. Mabuse! Well, Mabuse is proof that all of this is real, you can see in this series with the infamous character. Another series that fascinated me when I was a kid. A lot of speech and less action than other movies in the series. We discover Mabuse only in the end. Until then, we see Peter van Eick, smoking almost all the time, cigarettes, as usual, and Gert Fröbe, smoking pipe, as usual.

Fritz Lang is a talented director. He's the guy who made "Metropolis," a startling vision of the future before such visions were cool. And he made "M", which turned a monster into an object of pity. In America, after slipping out of Germany, he directed a couple of fascinating noirs.But you wouldn't know it from "Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse." Even the always-interesting presence of Peter Van Eyck, Hollywood's Ur-German, and the almost unrecognizable Wolfgang Preiss, can't save this from being a fairly typical B-movie with a plot more confusing than most.After an opening that might have come directly from a Charlie Chan movie -- a victim collapses in public, shot in the head with an almost undetectable sliver of metal -- we are taken to a garishly made-up Dawn Addams perched on the ledge of a tall building, about to jump for reasons we know not of.She's talked in by Van Eyck and there follow innumerable perplexing plot developments organized around a couple of themes that don't seem to have much to do with one another.Lang often made good use of mirrors and he does so here. And Gert Frobe turns in a good performance as a shambling, good-natured, pipe-smoking detective.The story, though, is full of incidents that may be suspenseful in themselves without helping the plot in an immediate way. It plods along like somebody with a club foot.It's a disappointing piece of work, slow and uninteresting. Fans of Fritz may get more out of it than I did.

The last film that Lang directed, this was to be his triumphant return to Germany after having fled the Nazis in the late 1930's. Unfortunately, it was brutally cut and re-edited when it was released here, so it never gained the popularity and acclaim that it deserved. It's the story of an American businessman in Berlin who is drawn into a secretive world of conspiracies, spies, and murder. Everyone in this movie is lying to him, with the single exception of the police inspector, played by a pre-"Goldfinger" Gert Frobe. But it's also the movie that effectively laid down the basic rules of the modern spy thriller: the handsome and well-dressed leading man who is equally at home with a gun, a girl, or a drink in his hand, the megalomaniacal and shadowy villain with plans for world domination, the gadgetry and surveillance, the hidden lair, etc. Don't be put off by the fact that it's a foreign, black and white movie – this is an exciting story told by a master director who has been unforgivably forgotten.

Returning to germany Lang let influence his Hollywood experiences in this german thriller. The criminal genius Dr. Mabuse (Wolfgang Preiss in his genious acting; afterwards his career was in international war- and anti-war movies as a german General) plays tricky with society and police. Detective Gert Fröbe plays good, some say Preiss plays better, decide for your own. This tentious thriller explores, that by little action big disport can be formed, imagine Lang would have made Face Off (1998) !