Fritz Lang | Dr. Mabuse, Der große Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit (The Great Gambler: A Picture of the Time) / 1922 || Dr. Mabuse, Inferno: Ein Spiel von Menschen unserer Zeit (Inferno: A Game for the People of our Age) / 1922

playing god

by Douglas Messerli

 

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou (screenplay, based on the fiction by Norbert Jacques), Fritz Lang (director) Dr. Mabuse, Der große Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit (The Great Gambler: A Picture of the Time) / 1922

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou (screenplay, based on the fiction by Norbert Jacques), Fritz Lang

(director) Dr. Mabuse, Inferno: Ein Spiel von Menschen unserer Zeit (Inferno: A Game for the People of our Age) / 1922

 

I’m always startled to remember just how many Weimar writers told stories that warned its pre-Nazi citizens of the disaster they would soon be facing. Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) brilliantly summarized the German situation to date and foretold the inevitable through his everyday murderer-salesman Franz Biberkopf, stunningly retold by Rainer Werner Fassbinder in the popular medium of TV in his series in 1980. Of course, Fassbinder had hindsight to guide him, but film director Piel Jutzi told the same story quite skillfully, if not as epically, to the contemporary audiences of his day in 1931. 

     Austria-Hungarian Empire-born writer Joseph Roth rehearsed similar tales in The Spider's Web (1923), Zipper und sein Vater (1928), and his important summary of the fall of the Austria-Hungarian Empire in his fiction Radetzky March (1932).

     Poets, dramatists, and artists such as Hugo Ball, Bertolt Brecht, George Grosz, Raoul Hausmann, and Otto Dix shouted out their disgust and horror with words and images just prior to the early 1930s.

     And the Luxembourgian writer Norbert Jacques wrote a particularly pointed fantasy in 1921 that found its way to film through the absolutely amazing cinema undertaking by Fritz Lang and his soon to be wife, Thea von Harbou in the first two Dr. Mabuse films, Der große Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit and Inferno: Ein Spiel von Menschen unserer Zeit in two separate parts in 1922. That film, in particular, the one I write about here, is a metaphorical picture of Adolph Hitler that is so pointed that it is almost impossible not to be startled by the coincidences represented by a man for no purpose other than the pleasure of power manipulates hundreds if not thousands of people and changes forever their fates.

     If that were not enough, Lang and von Harbou produced a second major film Metropolis in 1927 which told a similar tale in more symbolic and epic terms through a dystopian satire. By 1933, the year Hitler came to power, Lang and von Harbou were busy making yet another chapter in the long-ongoing Mabuse series, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, which was banned by the Nazis.

     As I have written elsewhere, Lang had become so respected by this time, that propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called the director in to inform and apologize for banning that work, while attempting to offer him the position of the head of the German film studio UFA. During that conversation, Lang reports, he determined to leave for Paris, but by the time the long meeting was over, the banks had closed. He claimed that, after selling his wife’s jewelry, he fled alone by train  to Paris that very evening, leaving behind most of his money, personal possessions, and his wife, who by that time had committed herself to the Nazi cause.

     Certainly, there is no more Hitler-like villain than Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Roggie, writer van Harbou’s former husband), who as a Doctor of Psychology, is also a criminal mastermind who uses his powers of hypnosis and mind control along with his masterful disguises applied with the helping, if also nervous hands of his cocaine-addicted secretary (and possibly male lover), Spoerri (Robert Foster-Larinaga). Although there are no sexual insinuations about the pair, Foster-Larinaga certainly plays the man closest to and most knowledgeable of Mabuse’s many faces as a prissy queer, hand constantly to his chin and lips pursed as he dotingly attends to the monster. Early on when Mabuse recognizes that he is affected that morning by cocaine he warns him that if he appears at work again under its influence that he will be immediately dismissed; to which Spoerri declares if that were to come about he would shoot himself in the head, expressing apparently his total devotion and love. Throughout Part I, Mabuse brutally upbraids his assistants Pesch (Georg John) and Hawasch (Charles Puffy), and leaves his former female lover, the Folies Bergère dancer Cara Carozza (Aud Egede-Nissen) to rot in jail. Yet he never seriously reprimands Spoerri, simply warning him instead of shoving or slugging this frail man as he does the others. Spoerri is not only his dresser, but his closest closet confident, the one who stands and sits next to him throughout most of each day.

    Mabuse also seems rather dependent on Georg, his Chauffeur (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), who rooms with Pesch. And the Doctor relies on him throughout the film for several quick escapes and murders of those who stand in his way.

 

    In the early scenes of the film we witness an almost James Bond-like heist of an important financial contractual paper being delivered from Switzerland to Berlin via courier. With split-second timing, Pesch grabs the papers, trusses up the courier, and drops the briefcase in which papers are contained off a viaduct into the open sporting car which Georg is driving at very moment beneath. The event immediately makes the news and causes a temporary panic in the market which allows Mabuse to buy when the stocks rapidly fall and to sell when the papers are suddenly rediscovered by locomotive authorities—all precisely arranged by Mabuse.

      Yet Mabuse’s true interest is in gambling, playing with the wealthy men and women who have made money from the German war economy of World War I, while most around them are suffering from inflation, joblessness, and low wages. Using his abilities at hypnosis—which he can evidently accomplish by simply looking in someone’s direction and sending thought waves which produce headaches and wild gambling urges—he plays in disguise winning from wealthy heirs, the young bourgeois, and fraudulent royalty such as the Russian woman (Lydia Potechina) in one such gambling scene.      

     The first victim we observe is the son of a wealthy businessman, Edgar Hull (Paul Richter) who Mabuse purposely encounters at the Folies Bergère, hypnotizing the young man just after he has fallen for the dancer Carozza, suggesting that the two move on to a private gambling club to which Hull belongs. There, under the name of Hugo Balling, he wins a huge sum of cash and a large promissory note from the young man, who when Mabuse as Balling leaves, Hull cannot even remember who the man was or how he came to be gambling with him. His friends are astounded, particularly when they discover the high cards with which he bowed out of the game.

      When Hull goes to the Hotel Excelsior where Balling has claimed to be staying, he discovers a man named Balling in the room who does not look like the same man from the night before and who denies that Hull owes him any money. 

     Hearing of the incident, State prosecutor Norbert von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke) makes a visit to Hull, suspecting other such cases may be linked with his own, and, accordingly, offers to protect Hull from further payment and danger if he’ll work with him.

      We soon discover that Mabuse owns most of the private and secret gambling clubs, many of them in dance halls and wine bars in rooms hidden away from the regular customers through entrance by a secret password and accompaniment through various passageways and sometimes through back alleys and into nearby buildings, all set up in expert disguise like Mabuse himself. Often the very complexity and detail of the gambling rooms provides us with a great sense of wonderment and humor. Like much of what Mabuse does, the cover is embellished as part of the game rather than with any significant “other” purpose.

     In one long sequence, for example, we see a drunk (Pesch) seeming to return home to an angry wife waiting by the door, the entire scenario played out publicly even when there appears to be no one else around, before he enters the house, and is escorted to a secret passageway, finally ending up in Hawasch’s underground money counterfeiting shop.

     Von Wenk, who obtains a listing of the clubs and passwords, begins to visit them one by one, often with Hull, observing the clients and their winnings and losings.

     At once such club, Schramm’s, we briefly observe another dancer, this one clearly in lesbian costume, played by the real-life notorious figure Anita Berber, a Weimar favorite cabaret dancer noted for her nude dances and her bisexuality which she expressed in the male tuxedo she wears in this film. Her painted lips, the center outlined in particular emphasis giving them a strange cupid-like effect, became the subject of one Otto Dix’s most noted works, “Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber.”

     At this same club, von Wenk meets the woman described as the “Great Unknown,” who sits apart from the gamblers to watch their faces as they win and lose, she claiming to the state Prosecutor that she can no longer feel any great emotion, having lost all interest in life and, particularly, in her husband who as Gräf (Count) Told (Alfred Abel, who would later play the Master of Metropolis, Jon Federsen), has made her a Countess, Gräfin Dusy Told (Gertrude Welcker*).

     She attracts the attention of Mabuse who playing in yet another disguise wins a pearl necklace off the bosom of the Russian lady mentioned above. At one point she asks von Wenk’s help in distracting the others so that she may escape, having spotted her husband entering the club. Von Wenk quickly switches off the lights as she disappears.

     When the state Prosecutor sits down to play cards with the “banker” he begins to notice that he cannot concentrate and that he, like Hull before him, bets against winning cards. Although he forces himself out of the trance, when he leaves soon after in chase of Mabuse, he takes a taxi driven by Mabuse’s Chauffeur who knocks him out by releasing canisters of gas, driving him to a small boat before setting him afloat in the middle of a river. Von Wenk is saved only by local river workers.

     Furious to have the prosecutor following him, Mabuse orders up the deaths of both von Wenk and Edgar Hull.

     Countess Told meets von Wenk again soon after, when he attempts to engage her as an agent in his attempts to discover the identity behind the gambling characters Mabuse plays each evening. Seeking adventure in her life, she agrees if only von Wenk can prove the existence of such a being.

      Her mansion is filled with great Expressionist works of the day and native African sculptures, all collected by her husband, who when we meet him we recognize immediately as a wispy gay man, long identified in film through their associations with art and culture which certainly both Mabuse and the Nazi’s after him would describe as degenerate art. We get glimpse of a work that seems to be by the artist Lyonel Feininger, later displayed in a special exhibition titled “Degenerate Art” by the Nazis. Certainly, seeing Gräf Told we suddenly understand the cause of his wife’s sense of unfulfillment. It is difficult to imagine Told, who one commentator described as a kind of vampire, having sex with his wife.

       However, even today, I am afraid, there is a tendency to confuse the Weimar Republic’s openness concerning sexuality with evidence of the moral collapse of the society which led to the Nazi rise. It is important that we not make that false association. If there are gay and lesbian figures in this work, in Lang’s vision they are not the ones, except perhaps for Spoerri, who are involved in carrying out Mabuse’s plots. And as I have suggested, Spoerri and Mabuse’s devotion to one another does not seem directly related to sex. Moreover, ultimately we realize that Mabuse loves no one but himself.

       When von Wenk is told by Hull of Carozza’s insistence that they attend the opening of a new club one evening, he accompanies the young man to the venue. This “petite” club, built around a circle features a large central floor which itself serves as the gambling table, around which the various small theater-like boxes serve as chairs around a table. If the police dare to suddenly show up, another floor slowly floats down from above containing a piano and dancer who begin to perform, hiding any evidence of the gambling beneath it.

     It is a near perfect ruse, except of course, as Carozza is aware, the state Prosecutor now knows all about it. He discreetly leaves to call for a raid, asking his assistant to protect Hull; but Carozza, suddenly aware of his absence, demands they leave immediately. Before the police arrive, she has walked Hull and his detective “friend” into danger on a nearby street as Mabuse’s men suddenly fall upon them and kill them both. The spot is raided and Carozza arrested.

 

     That same evening, Mabuse attends a séance where Count Told has taken his wife. The Countess, almost laughing at the machinations of the medium, who immediately declares she feels an unfriendly spirit among them. The Countess excuses herself from the table, realizing that she is obviously the one of whom the medium is speaking, and Mabuse joins her. Before she knows it, she has invited him to their chateau for a salon the next day, he obviously having determined her request.

      Now distraught over the loss of his colleague and the death of Hull whom he had been attempting to protect, von Wenk once again calls upon the Countess, hoping that she will act as someone who has also been caught up in a raid and, placed in the same cell with Carozza, will gain valuable information from her. The Countess agrees to do so. But the dancer immediately sees through the charade, shaming Told for becoming involved with the law, and explaining that the reason she does the unnamed Mabuse’s bidding is that she loves him, precisely because he is a god-like figure, unknowable and all powerful who has at least for a while loved her in return. The Countess immediately leaves the jail and in a letter expresses her refusal to be any further involved with von Wenk’s activities.

     Mabuse, having gathered his men, insists they have only one week in which to kill von Wenk before themselves meeting just such a fate. When asked by Spoerri if they shouldn’t attempt to free Carozza from jail, he dismisses the issue, insisting that it’s time she learns how to deal with her own fate. Obviously he no longer feels any feelings for her.

      Yet even the villains of Lang’s great film are amazingly complex. And soon after we watch as he repeats the word “woman” over and again, moving off to the room in which Carozza once slept and demanding Spoerri to immediately make up the bed as it once was.

      Has this man of no principles suddenly been touched by something akin to love. Is he seeking for the dancer’s return? The scene appears to be slightly illogical.  

     But later that afternoon, he attends the salon, although by this time the Countess has wished she could have disinvited him. There the Count suddenly feels the desire to gamble, and wins the first few rounds. But as the Countess recounts her story about Carozza, without mentioning her name, to Mabuse, expressing her amazement that a love such as hers still exists, Mabuse mocks it, arguing that power and will are all that truly matter. To prove it, he points to the Count who is suddenly found cheating his friends at cards. In shock and embarrassment, the Countess faints, Mabuse carrying her off, we realize, in the root meaning of rape, kidnapping the woman. The room that once was Carozza’s, is now to be her prison.

      The dazed and uncomprehending Count watches as his friends flee him without being able to explain his own actions.

 

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2022

 

 

*

 

 

After reintroducing the most recent of events, Lang’s film moves quickly forward with Count Told, finally coming out of his startled trance, who believing that his wife has left him along with all of his friends permanently, finds himself in deep despair and pays a visit to von Wenk. He explains to him all that has occurred. Obviously observing the similarities to the Count’s sudden gambling desire, his description of a headache, and his sudden and uncontrollable desire to cheat, recalls for van Wenk the many other gambling tragedies reported and the death of Hull. Yet, it appears that the state Prosecutor is a little slow-minded, unable to make the immediate connection between Told’s answer to his question was there anyone other than friends in attendance: Dr. Mabuse. When Told suggests he might pay the psychologist a visit in order to help him explain his own situation, von Wenk even approves of the idea.

     But, of course, by allowing Mabuse full control over Told, the Doctor can use her husband as another pawn in his attempt to force his attentions upon the Countess, which, as we all already suspect, will lead ultimately to Told’s death by suicide.

     Mabuse immediately cautions his new patient that he will see him only if he refuses to see anyone from the outside world during his care, which leads the Count to cut off all communications with von Wenk, Told’s butler reporting to the Prosecutor when he calls that the Count and Countess they have both left on a long voyage. Accordingly, von Wenk does even have the chance to discover that the Countess has been kidnapped.

     The prosecuting attorney is convinced that Carozza is his best source of finding who is behind all the various gambling scenes and murders, but she is still resistant, only telling her inquisitor that she will think about his offer to protect her in a couple of days, while immediately upon his leaving making it clear to the audience that she has no intention whatsoever of “squealing.”

      But Mabuse has already put Pesch to work as a guard at the Women’s Prison, who overhears her promise to von Wenk without being able to observe her private mockery of the situation, reporting back to Mabuse simply what he has heard. Mabuse who orders her death.

     Once more Lang reveals the complexity of his silent narrative by presenting us with a scene of Mabuse and Georg in a cab, Mabuse looking carefully at is pocket watch to make it clear, once again, things must run on schedule, before he takes a small object from his pocket and holding it in his hand. Lang funnels down the camera lens to a small lit circle of his open hand, as we see Georg’s hand reaching out for Mabuse’s, remaining just a second upon his master’s before taking away what we finally recognize to be a small vial, holding the poison which he will then take to Carozza, demanding that it is “time” to end her life.

     For a moment that scene almost seems to suggest some intimate expression between the two men, and we are forced to question what we are truly witnessing. Is it a sign of a covert love touch or something more sinister? It is of course both, Georg and Mabuse equally being men in love with the ability to control the fate of others. It is not sexual, but it is as close to an orgasm as these two men might ever experience to which Lang purposely draws our attention by miniaturizing the scene and focusing his camera upon it as if it were a secret to be revealed only to us.

     Having done no wrong, Carozza at first rejects the vial which she immediately recognizes represents her death sentence. But she too is wed to the master-in-control, willing like so many millions later in history to give up her life for one man’s often pointless and meaningless demands.

 

    Von Wenk arrives too late to save her, lifting her off the floor where she has fallen after taking the poison and putting her like a sleeping beauty back into her bed. He is a man of moral order if not the genius needed to solve this case.

    Mabuse continues, meanwhile, to attempt to break the Countess’ resistance, telling her that if she dare mention her husband again it is her death warrant. As it turns out, her insistence soon after that she wants to see her husband does lead to another visit of Mabuse to his “patient,” after which the Count slits his throat.

    Fortunately, his servant immediately calls von Wenk, who upon discovering the body and hearing the servant’s explanations about his master’s patient-relationship with Mabuse, finally begins to make the connection.        

     While von Wenk is out, however, Mabuse has planned for the inspector's death as well, sending Pesch to his office to set up a bomb, which goes off a few seconds before the prosecuting Attorney’s return, killing one of his men. Pesch, however, is captured and von Wenk orders up a special guard to protect his transfer to prison where he plans to intimidate him into naming his boss.

      It does appear, at times, that Mabuse is not merely a mastermind, but is a kind of god who appears out of nowhere to cause further chaos whenever threatened. Disguised yet again, he shows up in a local café insisting that someone who the drinkers apparently know has just been arrested; within moments he has roused the crowd to action against the approaching police van, the proletariat rising up and racing into the streets with the thunderous sounds of his voice much the way in the first scene of the film his voice led to a bear and bull market within a few moments.

      The working men and women surround the police van, disallow it to continue on its way. The detective in charge finally insists that the man for whom they are calling is not who they are carrying, and eventually pulls him forward for the crowd to see in order to prove it; but at that very moment Georg shoots and kills him for a distance.

      Finally, von Wenk himself attempts to call upon Mabuse at his house, but is told that the Doctor is out. When he returns to his office, he finds Mabuse within, his own detectives obviously having been hypnotized so that they could not even report to von Wenk that he was waiting there. Once more, Mabuse seems to have no difficulty convincing the somewhat gullible Prosecutor that the true villain is Sandor Weltmann who is known for his experiments in mind control, and who will soon be lecturing soon at the Philharmonic.

      We know that Mabuse will perform as Weltmann, but von Wenk is still gullible enough to believe that a visit is worth his attention, imagining that Weltmann and Mabuse may both be linked to a larger gang.

      He warns his men to attend the lecture with him using their intuition to save the day. Yet Mabuse/Weltmann is able to effectively mass-hypnotize his audience and, despite his own reservations, von Wenk himself, as he joins the hypnotist in an experiment on stage. Mabuse has written out his instructions, presumably for the film viewers alone to know that he has instructed the Prosecutor’s subconsciously to leave the hall, get into a waiting car, and speed off over the cliff of a nearby dam. In the very midst of his hypnosis von Wenk realizes that the Dutch man at one of the first gambling sessions, Weltmann, and Mabuse are one in the same. Nonetheless, the mental telepathy has been successfully transmitted, and von Wenk follows the instructions with only a couple of variances that Mabuse has included to fool the audience of his true intent.

     Fortunately, his men, again totally puzzled by situation as he jumps into the waiting car to drive away, do indeed follow their instincts as they trail him in a nearby taxi and save him at the very last moment from barreling over the cliff.

     When he comes round, von Wenk orders Mabuse’s house to be surrounded. When Georg discovers that fact, the Doctor and his men decide to fight it out, gathering up riffles and other artillery, successfully killing some of the storming policemen. Pulling back his men, von Wenk makes a call to Mabuse demanding he save everyone time by giving up; but the “god” even to himself refuses, revealing incidentally that he holds Countess Told in the house.

      Von Wenk finally calls in the military and although they also lose some men, they eventually are able to breach the house. We get our confirmation of Spoerri’s sexuality when Mabuse’s female crack rifleman, in the midst of the battle, calls out him to with the moniker “limp dick,” the nickname Georg uses as he attempts one of the last shotgun volleys. Presumably they are speaking of Spoerri’s inability to be sexually aroused by the “normal” means or perhaps of just his inability; but what we want to know is how they have come to be aware this fact. If nothing else, we know he has attempted to have been a “dick” to someone of the evil gang.

     The woman and Harwasch are killed, and Mabuse himself is wounded by the time the infantry break down the front door. The Countess is saved, while Mabuse takes a secret exit through the sewer system, ending up strangely enough in Hawasch’s counterfeiting shop where several blindmen work behind impregnable doors, the secret passage itself being open only from the outside while demanding a special key to open it from within.

      Georg is arrested and imprisoned and Spoerri, perhaps the only villain who may truly survive the chaos, is taken into custody, eventually admitting that the key von Wenk’s men have found unlocks the counterfeiting shop. The police rush to the spot, finding within Mabuse, now become mad after realizing that he was permanently trapped and being haunted by the ghosts all those he murdered.

       Even though we finally see Mabuse as a near-infantilized madman, we get the uneasy feeling that he may still have the power to convince some people of his remarkable powers. He has, after all, been able to make hundreds of people believe in his innocence and the necessity of acts. How to explain a Hitler or even a less clever man’s ability to convince millions to behave in abnormal ways such as the US rabble-rouser Donald Trump? Mabuse had only a team of six or seven; imagine if he had had a whole governmental bureaucracy behind him.

 

Los Angeles, July 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).