The Complete Fritz Lang Mabuse Box Set (Masters of Cinema)

Star Review

James Oliver praises this essential release from Masters of Cinema which contains all three of Lang's Mabuse films, one of which - The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse - here receives its first ever UK release.

This essential – hell, compulsory – box set from Masters of Cinema gathers together the three films that Fritz Lang made about criminal mastermind Dr. Mabuse. While any release of a Fritz Lang film is cause for celebration, the cheering should be especially loud for this: it marks the first time that the final film, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, has been available on home video in the UK in any format.

Lang hadn't tackled Mabuse for nearly thirty years when he started work on Thousand Eyes... but effortlessly recaptured the pulp rhythms of the earlier films. As devilish as ever, the wicked doctor has cooked up a scheme that involves experimental guns, blackmail, clairvoyance, two way mirrors, nuclear devastation and a luxury hotel. Can Commissioner Kras (Frobe) foil his plans?

Lang's final film has often been dismissed but it holds its own as a devious and punchy thriller. Indeed, its paranoia and interest in surveillance seem downright prescient in today's political climate.

Mabuse is one of cinema's greatest monsters. It's good to have him back

James Oliver on 30th September 2009
View all 57 of James Oliver's reviews

Film Description

From the early stages of his career across five decades to his final film, Fritz Lang built a trilogy of paranoiac thrillers focused on an entity who began as a criminal mastermind, and progressed into something more amorphous: fear itself, embodied only by a name — Dr. Mabuse. For the first time on home video, all three of Fritz Lang's Mabuse films have been collected for one package, in their complete and restored forms.

Contains:

1. Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler) (1922) — Lang's two-part, nearly 5-hour silent epic detailing the rise and fall of Dr. Mabuse in Weimar-era Berlin.

2. Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) (1933) - a tour-de-force thriller rife with supernatural elements, all converging around an attempt by the now-institutionalised Mabuse (or someone acting under his name... and possibly his will) to organise an 'Empire of Crime'.

3. Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse) (1960) — Fritz Lang's final film, in which hypnosis, clairvoyance, surveillance, and machine-guns come together for a whiplash climax that answers the question: Who's channelling Mabuse's methods in the Cold War era?

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• The films of Fritz Lang - DVDs from £5.99

DVD Extras

• 4 discs
• Original German-language intertitles for Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, along with newly translated English-language subtitles for each film
• Newly recorded feature-length audio commentaries on all three movies by film-scholar and Fritz Lang expert David Kalat
• Three video-featurettes totalling an hour-and-a-half in length on: the score of Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler
• the creation of Norbert Jacques' 'Mabuse' character
• and the motifs running throughout the works
• 2002 video interview with Wolfgang Preiss, the star of Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse
• An alternate ending to Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse taken from the French print of the film
• Optional English-language dub track for Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse
• Three lengthy booklets containing a new translation of Fritz Lang's 1924 lecture on 'Sensation Culture', an essay by critic and scholar Michel Chion on the use of sound in Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, new writing on Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse by critic David Cairns, extracts from period interviews with Fritz Lang, an abundance of production stills, illustrations, and marketing collateral, and more!

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