The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Too much of everything

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

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.

"Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse" or "The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse" is a 100-minute black-and-white film from Germany from 1960. And since the creation of Mabuse decades ago, there have been so many films about him (including some that are wrongly considered classics), and also many followed after 1960, even today. This one here has the advantage of the name Fritz Lang attached to it, the German silent film legend. But this one here is of course not a silent film anymore. For Lang, it was a bit of a return back to the roots with making another Mabuse movie and here we have one of his final works. The cast is decent with Peter van Eyck, Gert Fröbe ("Goldfinger", a personal favorite), Werner Peters and Wolfgang Preiss. It needed a better-written and acted character than Addams' though. Unfortunately, overall the script did not do too much for me. I have to say without mentioning Mabuse by name, this could have been a completely random film about another villain character. The significance attached to its name does not only come from saying the name all the time.It is not a failure by any means, but I thought with the cast Lang had he could have made a better film here. Maybe Thea von Harbou's creative touch was missing. Still the movie has a couple solid scenes that were tense and interesting to watch like the one outside the window for example, but overall it just felt like all the killing and drama was included to be shocking and mysterious, not as ingredients of a meal, of an edge-of-seat story that had me and other audiences captivated and genuinely caring about what will happen to the characters, who will live and who will die. Best thing about the film is clearly the acting, but even with how good it was, it was not enough to elevate the mediocre script to a level where I could recommend this movie. Thumbs down from me. Don't see it.

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.

Lang comes full circle: Mabuse made his name forty years earlier, and here Mabuse closes out his directorial career. Made on a shoestring budget with pretty obviously cardboard-quality sets, this is nonetheless nearly up to the level of the director's finest work, the fatalism and paranoia, the distrust of government and big business every bit as potent if not more so in the era of TV and jet aircraft as it was in the years before Hitler came to power.The plot is so complex and takes so many quick turns that, less than 2 weeks after seeing it, I'm already at a loss to readily describe it. Suffice it to say that a TV reporter dies in his car in traffic; at first, no foul play is suspected but soon it's found that he has a needle embedded in his brain, fired from some experimental weapon. Meanwhile a young woman connected with the anchorman tries to commit suicide -- she is saved by an American businessman, who soon becomes embroiled in the intrigue which in addition to an SF weapon involves 1-way mirrors, cameras watching nearly everyone's every move, a seer/magician and exploding telephones. Really, describing the plot would ruin much of the fun.Gert Frobe is really excellent as the police inspector in charge of the case; like a great many Americans I know him only as "Goldfinger" but he shows great ability here as a world-weary but still committed, intelligent and canny cop. The rest of the cast is solid, the crisp B/W photography and music all work to establish a claustrophobic, dangerous atmosphere....the VHS tape I watched was of surprisingly high quality. Not quite as engaging or exciting as the first two in the series, but still a more than fitting end to one of the greatest directorial careers in cinema.

The original "Mabuse" films were a silent film from 1922 and an early sound film. All were from Fritz Lang and concerned a criminal genius--sort of like a Blofeld-type character. Well, in this film, many decades have passed and a new series of brilliant crimes are being perpetrated and they have all the earmarks of the work of Mabuse. But could he be alive after all these years? With the help of a psychic (who looks really cool and creepy) and some seemingly irrelevant subplots (they do come together later), detective Gert Fröbe ("Goldfinger") and his team unravel the mystery and end the film with a dandy climax. Interestingly enough, Fröbe strongly resembles Inspector Lohmann from the 1933 Mabuse film.I must admit that I had a lot of trouble staying awake during the first half of the film--there were just so many weird and confusing characters that I found my attention wandering. However, I was thrilled that after a while, all the machinations and confusing plot elements actually paid off with a dandy ending that made the film worth while. However, for fans of director Fritz Lang, this film isn't among his better films but it is pretty good entertainment.