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The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse More at IMDbPro »Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse (original title)

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15 reviews in total

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21 out of 21 people found the following review useful:
Hugely influential Spy Caper ought to be seen, 3 March 2000

Author: Guy_T from London, England

You don't necessarily need to have seen Lang's earlier Mabuse films to be able to love this one. Like in his silent spy film 'Spione', Lang creates everything that would go on to be a genre cliche - but they all had to be original once. Here we have the stolen prototype weapon - a gun that fires needle shaped bullets that travel through glass and leave very little trace of assassination; and then there's the villain's car, with its revolving number-plates. Lang was certainly a few quick steps ahead of the makers of the Bond films, and certainly on a level with Hitchcock, Powell et al when it came to commenting on voyeurism.

The plot's labyrinthine, of course, but it rattles along at such a pace and with such striking visuals that you hardly have time or the inclination to stop and worry - and it all comes clear at the end, with one or two fantastic revelations in addition to the few you expect.

If one part doesn't quite please as much as you like, it's the context it fails to reference properly. Made at such a crucial time in History by a man who had seen so much, one only wishes it had more commentary to make. Lang's career swung like a pendulum between social commentary and serial escapades - if only he'd been able to pull the two together for his final film.

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18 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
Lang's last classic, 9 February 2005

Author: El_Rey_De_Movies from San Rafael, CA

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.

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18 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
Do yourself a favor...don't read the credits., 22 October 2002

Author: Rich Meyer (muzik@ptd.net) from Saint Clair, Pennsylvania

This is a great little whodunit and an excellent start to the revival of Fritz Lang's great Dr. Mabuse series. It is very reminiscent of the earlier films in the twenties and thirties, particularly Le Testament Du Dr. Mabuse, from which Lang lifts and modernizes many situations.

I said don't read the credits in the title to this review because guessing who is actually the mastermind Mabuse is half of the fun...there are a lot of red herrings that don't play out until the last fifteen minutes of the movie.

This was the first movie in the new Mabuse series and I would recommend anyone delving into the world of Dr. Mabuse use this as a starting point (especially if none of the silents or early talkies are available in your area).

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7 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
A great show, reminds me of the serials of the 1930's, 14 February 1999

Author: James A. Phillips (unclejappy@aol.com) from Bangor ME

This is a 16mm print which I acquired in a batch of films. It is very well dubbed in English. I assume the film is available on video. This film reminds me of the serials of the 1930's. Fritz Lang ended his career with this swansong, a return to a theme of his earlier Dr. Mabuse films. The master criminal's henchmen have never seen his face, and get their commands by radio while cruising in a van. Note the scene in the police commissioner's office. Everyone is smoking furiously and the room soon becomes filled with smoke. There is an almost identical scene to this in "M". Overall and very amusing and enjoyable film.

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5 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
My first venture into the world of Dr. Mabuse, 30 August 2006

Author: bensonmum2 from Tennessee

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse represents my first venture into the world of Dr. Mabuse. Pigeon-holing this movie into a single genre is difficult. It's one part traditional krimi, one part spy movie, and one part thriller. Combined, these elements create, at least for me, a one of a kind experience that I really can't compare with much of anything I've seen before. I refuse to give the normal plot synopsis. Any plot details or other information would ruin the many twists and surprises found in The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. Fortunately for me, I went into the movie completely blind, knowing very little of what to expect. I would suggest not even looking over the IMDb page as vital information is presented on Mabuse's identity. The acting is good from a cast that, even if I didn't know all of the names, I recognized from years of watching WWII movies. Actors like Gert Forbe, Werner Peters, and Peter van Eyck give sold performances. Fritz Lang's direction is as competent as ever. The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse has style to burn. Considering the movie was made more than 45 years ago, it still feels remarkably fresh. The mystery of who Dr. Mabuse is and what his fiendish plan is all about are wonderfully compelling and really pull you into the movie. The jazzy score is impossible to get out of your mind and fits well within the film. In short, it's movie like this that keeps me excited about exploring "new" cinema. If all of my first time viewings could be this entertaining, I would be very happy indeed.

If The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse has one weakness, it's the slow pace of the second act. The pace grinds to a crawl as the police begin their investigation into the events taking place. While it's fairly interesting and Gert Forbe is a good enough actor, there's not enough action in this portion of the film when compared with what came before and what comes afterward. A little more pep in the middle third of the film would have made it a real winner with me. It's a minor issue I have with the film, but it's an issue nonetheless.

As I wrote previously, The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse is the first Mabuse movie I've seen. After my wonderful experience with the movie, it won't be the last.

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6 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
1000 Eyes watching YOU, 24 July 2000

Author: (amikus2000) from Marburg

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) !

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4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Good last, old fashioned styled, thriller from Fritz Lang., 3 January 2008

Author: Boba_Fett1138 from Groningen, The Netherlands

Of course this isn't the most classic or best Fritz Lang movie but it nevertheless is a more than worthy last one by him. It's not that he died shortly afterward (he lived till 1976) but he lost his eye sight and by 1964 he was already nearly blind. It feels right that he ended his directing career with a Dr. Mabuse movie. His previous 2 directed Dr. Mabuse movies, "Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler - Ein Bild der Zeit" and "Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse" are among his best and also best known works. He obviously had some real passion and respect for the character of Dr. Mabuse. Why else would he had made 3 movies involving the character, over the course of 4 decades. The character is of course also a real intriguing ones. He was one of the first real movie villain in the 1922 movie "Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler - Ein Bild der Zeit". A character that manipulates, influences peoples will, all for his own benefits, with the help of hypnotic and supernatural powers.

Just like 7 of the 8 Dr. Mabuse movies made, this movie is shot in atmospheric black & white. Fritz Lang made a few color movies late in his career but for this movie he went back to his beloved black & white. No doubt he did this on intentions to let this movie connect more and better to the previous 2 Dr. Mabuse movie, made before this one. After all, the last Dr. Mabuse made before this one dates back from 1933.

Even though this movie is made 27 years later, it's still a direct sequel to to "Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse". It makes lots of references to the events which occurred in that movie. However if you haven't seen the previous 2 movies, I think you'll also still have a good time watching this movie and understand the events in it.

The visual style and style of film-making is also mostly the same when compared to the 1933 movie. A style Fritz Lang was of course very experienced in, being one of the best directors of the '20's and '30's. Nevertheless the movie is still set in its 'present' day 1960. It makes this a '60's movie in '30's style, which also provides the movie with a few clumsiness's and at times makes this movie feel, sound and look way more outdated. It therefor can be argued if this was the right approach. No doubt it is also part of the reason why this movie isn't as well known and appreciated as the previous two Dr. Mabuse movies from 1933 and 1922.

The cinematography within this movie is especially great and helps to give the movie its own unique atmosphere and old fashioned feeling style.

Gert Fröbe was really excellent in this movie. He proofs himself once more to be one of the best German actors that ever lived. Ir's fun that many actor appearing in this movie also appeared in the later Dr. Mabuse sequels, often in completely different roles, including Gert Fröbe.

It's sort of too bad that the whole movie doesn't have the pace and excitement of the movie its first halve. There is more talking than real thriller or suspense moments in the second part. Still the whole mysterious atmosphere and question; 'Who is Dr. Mabuse?', remains present throughout the entire movie. The movie also ends with a real blast and gets surprisingly action filled toward its ending.

Yet another real recommendable Dr. Mabuse movie!

8/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

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5 out of 6 people found the following review useful:
Fritz Lang's swan song, 16 July 1999

Author: evilskip from Cullman Alabama

What a swan song this is! Wild and wooly fun from Fritz Lang. Dr Mabuse is running his criminal empire from the Hotel Luxor. His henchmen never see his face as they receive their orders via radio.Without giving too much away his plans involve the takeover of a rich man's empire and general blackmail and murder.Gert Frobe plays the inspector out to nab Mabuse before Mabuse kills him.Funniest scene takes place in the Inspector's office when everybody starts to fall before a bomb goes off! After watching 5 Mabuse movies in a row this is easily the best.It is available from Sinister Cinema.

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
The Berlin Wall is in that psychotic vision, 14 June 2010

Author: Dr Jacques COULARDEAU from Olliergues, France

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

It is interesting to discover or rediscover Fritz Lang. He was well known for one film, Metropolis, and then for a few American films, films he shot in the USA. But the full set of Dr Mabuse's films is fascinating in a way because it provides a rare vision on the German cinema from the early 1920s to 1960. The eye looking at the world from a German point of view that spans over Hitler, Nazism and the Second World War is Fritz Lang's. We know him for his highly symbolical Metropolis in which the meaning is built by visual and numerical symbols. In this Dr Mabuse it is different. There are quite a lot of symbols but inherited from the silent cinema of the old days, symbols that are there only to make clear a situation that had been depicted previously with pictures and no words, or a page of intertitles. Fritz Lang still uses that technique in his 1960 film, which is a long time overdue for a silent cinema technique. But that is a style, nothing but a way of speaking, not a meaning. The meaning is absolutely bizarre. Dr Mabuse is a highly criminal person but his objective is not to commit crimes in order to get richer or whatever. It is to control the world through his criminal activity. The world is seen as basically negative, leading to chaos and overexploitation, leading to anarchistic crime and nothing else because the only objective of this modern world is to make a profit by all means available. Dr Mabuse is a master mind of his time and for him crime is the only way to destroy that capitalistic world that he never calls capitalistic or Kapitalismus and to replace it with pure chaos that should be able to bring a regeneration, a rejuvenating epiphany, a re-founding experience. We find in his mind what we could find in some of the most important criminal minds in this world, like Carlos in France, or Charles Manson in the USA, or those sects that practice mass suicide in order to liberate the suicidees and to warn the world about the coming apocalypse. It is the mind and thinking of those who practice war as a revolutionary activity with a fundamentalist vision of their religions or politics and the world that is supposed to reflect that religion. They do not want to build a different society and when they are in power they are constantly aiming at antagonizing their own population and the world because they cannot exist if they do not feel some opposition that they can negate, bring down, crush, like in Iran, or in Germany with Hitler, though later on it was not much different under the Communists in East Germany. These visions need opposition to exist and they provoke that opposition by aiming at taking the control of the world with violence and imposing their control with more violence. That's Dr Mabuse, the main brain of a criminal decomposition and re-composition of society on an absolutely antagonistic vision of life. But that vision is very common. Just as common as this phrase "a half full glass is nothing but a half empty glass". Add antagonism to that dual vision and then you have a struggle to the death between the half empty glass that wants to be full and the half full glass that wants to be empty (or full?), one half only wanting to take what the other half has and impose his half to the other half to make the world one by the elimination of the other side of the coin. That dual antagonistic vision is the popular and shrivelled up approach of the communist catechism of Stalin, inherited from Marx's French son in law Paul Lafargue, or of course in all dictatorship that reduces life to a little red book, to one hundred quotations from the master thinker of the revolution. That's the world you feel in these films. Fritz Lang embodies this ideology of the mentally poor in that criminal character of his: kill, rob, steal, counterfeit. Even if you die when doing so, the world will change and remember. The master criminal has to die in his activity in order to regenerate the world. What Fritz Lang introduced in his double main feature of the early 1920s and in his Testament, is that the master brain of this vision internalizes this paranoid and psychotic vision of the world into himself and has to become psychotic himself and it is in his psychosis that he finds the energy to conquer the world again. In the third film, Dr Mabuse has been dead for a long time and is reincarnated by someone who finds his inspiration in the doctor. That is a far-fetched cinematographic and fictional antic that is necessary as a reference but brings nothing to the vision itself. A few years later that ideology was to conquer our imagination in many ways. First the Berlin Wall became the symbol of that vision the way it was carried and conveyed to the world by the East-German communists. Then we have to think of the various revolutionary movements like Der Baader Meinhof Komplex, Die Rote Armee Fraktion, to take some German examples. But think of the French Mesrine and the Italian revolutionary urban guerilla warfare movements and you will have a fair picture of this psychotic criminal mind copied and pasted into the political field. The Maoist Red Guard and Cultural Revolution movement was quite typical of this approach. All that was going to come in 1960 and we must admit Fritz Lang was seeing ahead of his time, just as he had seen Hitler in his Testament of Dr Mabuse: a political leader based on hypnosis and mesmerizing people into blindly following a band of criminals.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID

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3 out of 3 people found the following review useful:
Who's The Mad Dr. M?, 4 October 2007

Author: Benjamin Gauss from Salzburg, Austria

Fritz Lang's "Die 1000 Augen Des Dr. Mabuse" aka. "The Thousand Eyes Of Dr. Mabuse" of 1960 is, after 27 years, the third movie on the arch-criminal Dr. Mabuse, the first one made after World War 2, and Lang's last movie as a director. Although not brilliant in any of its aspects, this is a very well-acted, highly entertaining and original mystery that maintains its suspense and stays interesting throughout its 100 minutes, as it cleverly bears more than one surprise.

After a reporter is murdered on his way to a TV station in Wiesbaden, Comissioner Kras' (Gert Fröbe) investigations lead him to a local luxury hotel. As the investigations are dragging on without progress, Kras is offered the help of a mysterious blind psychic...

The acting in "The 1,000 Eyes Of Dr Mabuse" is generally very good, especially Gert Fröbe, who would play the arch villain "Goldfinger" in the greatest James Bond movie four years later, delivers a great performance as the rough-and-ready police commissioner Kras. Further great performances come from Wolfgang Preiss, Dawn Addams, and Werner Peters, who plays and obtrusive insurance salesman. The movie remains interesting all the time, as there's one little twist after another, and just when you think that something was predictable, another twist is coming up. One noticeable quality of this movie is that director Lang, who had fled to the United States in the years of Naziism, dares to mention the Nazi times in the movie, which (allthough only mentioned casually once or twice) was more than rare in 1960, a time when popular German movies usually remained as silent as possible about this "unpleasant" subject.

"Die 1000 Augen Des Dr. Mabuse" is not one of Fritz Lang's masterpieces, but it definitely is a highly entertaining and clever mystery, that should not leave anybody bored. Recommended!

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