GoetheKino|GoetheCine - Silent Movies Special
Director: Fritz Lang, b/w, 122 min., 1932
The film continues the tale of the first two parts of DR. MABUSE, DER SPIELER: the villain continues his demonic dealings in the lunatic asylum. He has managed to hypnotize the asylum's director Dr. Baum, bringing him under his control. With Dr. Baum's assistance, he commands a band of unscrupulous gangsters. As though driven by the furies, Mabuse sits in his cell planning one violent act after another.
DAS TESTAMENT DES DR. MABUSE is often considered a decidedly anti-fascist film prophesying the crimes shortly to be committed by the Nazis. The story and its production are certainly conducive to such an interpretation, as is the fact that the planned premiere was cancelled at short notice and the film subsequently banned. At a presentation in New York in 1943, Fritz Lang himself explained in a "foreword to the film" that "the intention of the film was to illustrate Hitler's terror methods by comparison. The slogans and credoes of the Third Reich are uttered by gangsters in the film. In this way, I hoped I might be able to strip the mask from these teachings behind which there is only the urge to destroy everything that a nation holds dear and holy." Fritz Lang emigrated from Germany not long after the film was banned, although the Propaganda Minister would gladly have kept him as director.
Film historians today doubt Lang's own interpretation of DAS TESTAMENT DES DR. MABUSE and above all his claim that the film's objective from the outset was to expose fascist terror methods. "The strange thing is that the purported Nazi allegory was so well concealed that even the film's scriptwriter Thea von Harbou (Lang's wife at the time ... and a member of the National Socialist Party) had no knowledge of his intention." (Folke Isaksson and Leif Furhammar in "Politics and Film", Ravensburg, 1974).
On a different level, DAS TESTAMENT DES DR. MABUSE is also an extremely clever and well thought-out genre product, "a detective story produced with great sophistication in which the motifs which fascinated Lang throughout his life are easily picked out: claustrophobic fear of enclosed spaces, magical communication through hypnosis and its deciphering" (Michael Töteberg). This is characterized by Fritz Lang's masterly use of sound at a time when the sound film was still in its infancy, his handling of dialogues and voices which appear limited and deceptive means of comunication, as well as his handling of sounds which sometimes correspond with the use of light effects.
In this film, Fritz Lang skillfully refined the means taken from the silent film. His handling of the associative montage is masterly and the settings constructed for the film are truly impressive.
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