The Thousand Eyes Of Dr Mabuse
Year: 1962Certificate: 12
After enjoying fantastic success with Fritz Lang’s two-part “Indian Epic” in 1959, German producer Artur Brauner signed the great director to direct one more film. The result would be the picture that, in closing the saga he began nearly forty years earlier, brought Lang’s career full-circle, and would come to represent his final celluloid testament—by extension: his final film masterpiece.
Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse [The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse] finds that diabolical Weimar name resurfacing in the Cold War era, linked to a new methodology of murder and mayhem. Seances, assassinations, and Nazi-engineered surveillance tech—all abound in Lang’s paranoid, and ultimate, filmic labyrinth.
One of the great and cherished “last films” in the history of cinema, Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse provides a stylistic glimpse into the 1960s works on such subjects as sex-crime, youth-culture, and LSD that Lang would unfortunately never come to realise. Nonetheless, Lang’s final film remains an explosive, and definitive, closing statement.