Review - The Testament of Dr. Mabuse

 February 6, 2025
 
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse – Germany, 1933
 

There is an eleven-year gap between Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler and its sequel, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, and one can only hope that a director has a powerful – and creative - incentive for returning to a story after such a long gap in time. Students of film history know this is hardly the case, however, partly because few sequels are actually necessary. They neither complete a story or explain something pivotal to our understanding of the original film. After all, national emergencies are over, criminal threats have been thwarted, and the main antagonists are either dead or incapacitated. Thus, most sequels elect to move on to a new threat, a new romance, and often a new set of wacky or imposing supporting characters.
 
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is such a sequel. Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler ended, as so many supervillain storylines before and after it have done, with Dr. Mabuse going mad and being sent to an insane asylum. It picks up the story years later, and we find Mabuse (again played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge) still living out his days in a mental hospital. Well, living may not exactly be the right word. In a speech given by the head of that hospital, we learn that Mabuse’s state has in fact been improving. No longer does he sit upright all day simply staring into space. Now he sits upright frantically filling page after page with intricate instructions for criminal activity, such as disrupting financial markets and flooding city streets with illegal drugs. This, it seems, is an improvement of sorts seeing as how his etchings have gone from incomprehensible scribbles to repetitious words to fully-visualized homicidal ramblings – clearly an accomplishment for the mental health profession.
 
The problem is that Mabuse is now a senile broken old man who could hardly run a global terrorist organization. Fortunately, as his doctor reminds us, he has a number of talents, one of which is the power of suggestion, and it is soon clear that someone has been following his plans. But who? I imagine most of you can answer this question already, but a co-worker of the culprit cannot, so he blurts out that he’s going to the police and, in one of the film’s most ingenious sequences, is murdered at a busy intersection. Meanwhile, a disgraced former law officer named Hofmeister (Karl Meixner) contacts Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) claiming to have traced the source of counterfeit money that is flooding the market. However, before he can reveal the source, the lights go out, and screams ring out. When he is next heard, he is singing in a high-pitched voice about a woman named Gloria. We also meet a henchman named Tom Kent (Gustav Diesel) who is in love with a young woman named Lilli (Wera Liessem) who a year earlier took pity on him when he was down on his luck. In one scene, we learn that Tom just happens to abhor murder, a position that puts him at odds with the criminal organization that he has found employment in. But can someone in love who dislikes killing really be all that bad?
 
One of my complaints about the first Mabuse film was that far too much screen time was devoted to showing Mabuse’s many exploits when it had already established his criminal tendencies, making the movie longer than necessary. For the most part, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse avoids this problem. Scenes of henchmen talking about their nefarious activities are interspersed with segments devoted to Lohmann’s expanding investigation, as well as Tom’s growing conscience.
 
And yet something is missing. For the film to work, the film’s big revelation needs to hit audiences with a bang. It needs one of those a-ha moments that brings all of the film’s many pieces together and explains the ascendency of a new crime boss, his peculiar means of communicating to the men carrying out his dirty work, and his ability to open doors despite being in sprit form. (Yes, that happens.) Instead, we get an explanation that makes it seem as if the antagonist and Mabuse sat down and thought about all of the possible things that his henchmen might say to him just so there would be a pre-determined answer, and since Mabuse is mostly immobile, the antagonist has to be present every time the henchmen get their instructions in order for the device that plays the answers to be activated. The longer you think about it, the more laughable the idea becomes.
 
Part of what has gives The Testament of Dr. Mabuse such prominence among film buffs is Lang’s use of Nazi slogans, which are whispered by Mabuse frequently in the film. This put Lang directly in the crossfire of the Nazi party and resulted in his having to leave Germany for the warmer shores of the United States. It also resulted in the film being banned in Germany until 1961. There is certainly an eeriness to the scenes in which these sickening sentiments fill the screen, yet they do not add much to our views of Mabuse himself. We already know he is evil, that he enjoys manipulating both the economy and society at large, and that he seeks to create misery for the citizens of Germany. In other words, they do not necessarily make Mabuse more monstrous than he already is.
 
And yet, I can imagine those words were the reason that Lang made the film in the first place. As Chaplin did with The Great Dictator, Lang may have been trying to warn the people of Germany of the dangers of their government’s present course. If so, he did so indirectly in a film in which the law and love win out in the end. In other words, the threat is over. Seen years later, it is hard to say that their presence is enough to overcome the film’s predictability and lack of logic. (on DVD from Criterion Collection)
 
2 and a half stars
 
*The Testament of Dr. Mabuse is in German with English subtitles.