PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*
Fritz Lang's final film, THE THOUSAND EYES OF DOCTOR MABUSE, was the only one in the loose series that I judged to be in the combative mode. Though Lang had worked in the adventure-genres several times during his career, I find a number of his works a bit on the fusty side. This may be because Lang had a strong investment in naturalism. Sometimes naturalistic touches improve adventure-stories, giving them greater immediacy. Other times, they can inhibit or even incapacitate the genre-tropes.
THOUSAND EYES proved successful, so German producers ended up making five more movies about the reborn criminal mastermind. Harald Reinl, whose works I do not know, directed the first two, and without making a one-on-one comparison with EYES, I would say that Reinl finds as good a balance between fantasy and reality as Lang ever did.
Two of the major players from EYES return in essentially the same roles. The policeman viewpoint character (Gert Frobe) is named Lohmann this time instead of Kras, but Lohmann takes the same tough-minded approach to the Mabuse mystery, including the question as to whether some modern-day individual (Wolfgang Preiss) has taken up the mastermind's mantle. A new romantic pair, played by Lex Barker and Daliah Lavi, take the place of the pair from EYES, and Barker eventually edges out Frobe in the subsequent installment.
This time the master criminal ventures into science fiction territory, using a mind control drug to turn ordinary men into zombies, whose ultimate aim to destroy a nuclear power plant. For all the comic-bookish sound of this plot, though, Reinl and scripters Fodor and Behm handle Lohmann's pursuit more like a police procedural, so that the extraordinary events seem more disconcerting than they would in a formula comic book. Indeed, this juxtaposition of the real and the unreal bears a minor similarity to Gordon Douglas's 1954 big-bug film THEM! Though Preiss does not have as many scenes in his Mabuse identity as the character did in the original silent films, he projects a greater super-villain intensity here than he did in EYES, where he seemed a bit too much like a metaphor for evil.
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