The "spieler" in the title of Fritz Lang's silent crime epic Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler probably translates better to English as "player" or "swindler" than as "gambler", although the central figure does demonstrate the nifty trick of hypnotising his opponents around the card table into conceding defeat. Mabuse is one of those master criminals the pre-sound cinema was so obsessed by: a con artist and master of disguise, visiting lecturer in psychoanalysis, a fixer of markets and forger of banknotes.Part One, played out as a series of six acts, hurtles around the boys' clubs of post-WWI Germany - the stock exchange, the pontoon clubs, the fancy restaurants and private casinos - in constant pursuit of a character forever on the make. The plot - set out in florid, verbose title cards - takes some working out (it doesn't help that the main character keeps shifting shape), but eventually turns on the investigation of Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) by State Prosecutor von Wenk (Bernhard Goetzke), a figure who inevitably prefers to watch rather than play, and has himself to take up disguise to get anywhere close to his quarry.
Prototypically Langian in its study of an underworld, with characters offered a choice of cocaine or cards as they enter the backrooms of seedy drinking dens, it is at once more exotic and adventurous than the log-cabin melodramas the American cinema of the time was putting out, not to mention more historically attuned: it ends with Mabuse demonstrating "proof of will" in a card game, then looming, Nosferatu-like, over a swooning countess, long after the gambler's first moll has spoken the definitive state-of-the-nation line "we are bored and tired - we need sensation". The bread and circuses of Nazi rhetoric would only be a couple of hands, or deals, away.
Part Two is set out as a game of chess, with Mabuse at one end of the board, von Wenk at the other, and a count and countess - the patsies of Part One - becoming the pieces to be manipulated between them, thus establishing Mabuse's ability to get his claws into high society while preserving his grip on the underworld. It's closer to the serials of the era - resolving those cliffhangers set up at the end of the first part - than what we now know as a sequel; certainly, the pace quickens appreciably as this "episode" heads towards its conclusion.
Part One sprawls rather, dissipating its effects, but Part Two is both leaner and more satisfying, big on action (Mabuse throws bombs and baying mobs into Wenk's path), still-effective trick photography (both the count and Mabuse are haunted by ghostly card players), set-pieces (Mabuse, dressed as Rasputin, plots Wenk's destruction during a live stage show; the final shootout on a foggy street between Mabuse's speedfreak heavies and the military police) and performances and sets that become only wilder and more expressionistic as events move on: in the title role, Klein-Rogge starts out all mad eyebrows and shaking fists in a striking scene of drunken abandon, and gradually cranks up from there.
To a modern eye, it's amazing von Wenk doesn't realise who Mabuse is any earlier than he does; the State Prosecutor is made to look stupid indeed by a narrative that insists he entrust the Count to the trickster's professional care. Otherwise, this is a tremendously exciting battle of wills, and - given that the charismatic villain refers to himself as "a State within a State with which I've always been at war", and urges his supporters to engage in full-on kampf - one clearly ripe for all manner of historical readings.
Dr. Mabuse, Der Spieler/Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler is available on DVD from Eureka.
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