THE INVISIBLE DOCTOR MABUSE (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

INVISIBLE DOCTOR MABUSE is the second of the non-Lang German series about the evil mastermind, and the last directed by Harald Reinl. I commented that Reinl's previous entry had a strong blend of real-world verisimilitude and pulp thrills, but INVISIBLE shows the series moving toward pure pulp. That's not necessarily a bad thing, depending on the creative talents involved, but the first couple of sixties Mabuses felt more grounded than the later entries I've seen. But compared to most of the dilatory Eurospy flicks ground out once the Bond craze took fire, any of the Mabuse films seem superior fare.

This time stalwart FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) plays a largely lone hand, investigating a mysterious murder. His inquiries lead him to a theatrical revue, where a young woman named Liane (Karin Dor) seems to be haunted by some unseen specter. But it's not Mabuse himself, even though the idea of the sinister plotter spying on people via invisibility is a natural extension of, say, his use of sophisticated cameras in THOUSAND EYES OF DOCTOR MABUSE. In point of fact, Mabuse himself is never invisible, though he plans to create an army of imperceptible minions with which to rule the world.

No, the unseen specter haunting Liane is none other than her former boyfriend, the inventor of the invisibility device, Professor Erasmus (Rudolf Fernau). Liane thinks Erasmus dead from a car crash, but he survived, albeit with disfiguring injuries, and ever since he's used his mechanism to remain close to his beloved. It's implied that Erasmus doesn't want Liane to see him in his disfigured state, though it's possible that his haunting presence alerts Mabuse's thugs and causes them to swarm toward the theater. Fortunately, Como is there to protect the woman, leading to a few good fights and an assassin dressed up as a sinister clown. Mabuse loses his chance at the device, of course. Wolfgang Preiss appears in a disguised identity but he doesn't have as much to do in this film. When he's in his sanctuary his "real face" remains in shadow, so I guess in one sense he is "invisible."

The Bond movie series loosely parallels the phenomenalities of the German Mabuse series. Whereas the Bond books are almost entirely uncanny or naturalistic (with the marginal exception of DOCTOR NO), the Bond movies-- beginning, like INVISIBLE, in 1962-- quickly souped up Ian Fleming's plots with sci-fi gimmickery. The Mabuse films did the same thing faster and with more extravagance. In fact, INVISIBLE's explanation for the device's principle is that it utilizes "cosmic dust" to block light-waves. This inventive explanation, far from the corpus of H.G. Wells, is my main reason for giving INVISIBLE a "fair" mythicity. It's fun to see the invocation of some space-age gobbledygook, especially since Fritz Lang, Mabuse's creator, made his own "race for space" movie in 1929, the supremely dull WOMAN IN THE MOON.