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starring: Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Aud Egede Nissen, Gertrude Welcker, Alfred Abel, Bernhard Goetzkedirected by: Fritz Lang
List Price: $39.98Amazon.com's Price: $37.98 You Save: $2.00 ( 5%)Prices subject to change.
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 0014381941838
Format: Black & White, Silent, NTSC
Label: Image Entertainment
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
Number Of Items: 2
Publisher: Image Entertainment
Release Date: August 28, 2001
Running Time: 242 minutes
Sales Rank: 71332
Studio: Image Entertainment
Theatrical Release Date: 2022
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Editorial Review:
Amazon.com:
It's hard to imagine that the razor-sharp Kino DVD of Fritz Lang's first magnum opus fails to capture any of the visual electricity and heady atmosphere experienced by Berlin filmgoers in 1922. The film's historical importance to the crime-film genre and its thematic relevance to the director's later work have never been in dispute, but with only murky, choppy editions to go by, the movie has largely been paid lip service for its legacy rather than appreciated for itself. Now, thanks to this definitive restoration by the Murnau Institute, we can properly see it and experience it.
Dr. Mabuse the Gambler is actually two films in one--or, more precisely, one film in two feature-length parts totaling four-and-a-half hours and conceived to be watched on consecutive evenings. Its title character is a criminal mastermind with the power and the will to orchestrate complex capers, counterfeit national currencies, manipulate the stock market, and hypnotically bend anyone to play a role in his diabolical designs. The hand of Mabuse seems to reach everywhere--for the excellent reason that the Doctor himself, a master of disguise, turns out to be just about anywhere at just the moment his intervention will wreak havoc and wreck lives. (He's played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who would repeat the part ten years later in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and also, in spirit if not in name, in Lang's dazzling 1928 film Spies; he was also the inventor Rotwang in Metropolis--as well as, offscreen, the former husband of Lang's screenwriter wife Thea von Harbou!)
The film's title in German is Doktor Mabuse der Spieler, and our supervillain is really less a gambler (all his games of chance are rigged) than a player: playing multiple roles, but even more importantly, playing with others' lives, playing with the very fabric of modern reality. The subtitles of the two parts are 'A Picture of the Time' and 'People of the Time'; the film is an artifact of the Weimar era when, as one character remarks, 'We are bored and tired ... we need sensations of a very special kind to remain alive.' Lang and his art directors, Otto Hunte and Karl Stahl-Urach, create a hallucinatory mise-en-scène in which the decor is at once stark and decadent, a playground for all manner of perverse spectacle and gamesmanship, a maze of corridors and doorways and streets where the modern and the gothic interlayer. This world ripe for Mabusian manipulation prefigured Hitler by a decade--and in one of his last declarations, the Doctor anticipates more contemporary visionaries of chaos: 'I feel as a state within a state, with which I have always been at war.' Fritz Lang continues to be a chillingly prophetic filmmaker. --Richard T. Jameson
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - THE GOOD DOCTOR....
Quite possibly the greatest silent film of all time. It's right up there with Gance's NAPOLEON & Eisenstein's POTEMKIN. Better than anything Griffith ever did. Pulp fiction for the masses, yet an artistic masterpiece! Closer to Keaton than Chaplin. Not to be taken seriously, but should be taken seriously...I love this film & recommend it to all.
Certainly one of the TOP 25 GREATEST FILMS ever made.
Rating: - Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler
Winning the trust of wealthy businessmen he can manipulate to his own ends, mad mesmerist Dr. Mabuse (Klein-Rogge) employs his psychic abilities to lure millionaire Edgar Hull (Paul Richter) into a fateful card game, prising information he plans to use in order to corner trade on the stock market. But wily police commissioner Von Wrenk (Bernhard Goetzke) is on Mabuse's trail, and is planning to bring an end to the devious doctor's criminal operation.
Newly remastered by Kino ... Read More
Rating: - A major force in Germany 1922
The period after WW1 was for Germany featured by an unbridled vices, sharp depression in many orders, hopeless, desperation, deep despair, hysteria and cynicism. So Dr. Mabuse should be the prototype of his own time, a man who didn't' t believe in love but desire; a gambler, he bets, plays cards, roulette and lives and fates of people simply because there was not reason for not making it. "If God doesn't exist , everything is permitted" , in words of Dostoievsky. Mabuse represents the reincarnation ... Read More
Rating: - German Expressionist Masterpiece
Though pre-dating "Metropolis",Fritz Lang's absolute silent masterpiece and not quite as nightmarish as "Cabinet of Doctor Caligari" or "Nosferatu", "Dr. Mabuse-The Gambler" created a disturbing (and frightfully prophetic) and highly suspenseful masterwork about the criminal genius Dr. Mabuse who manipulates people's minds to carry out his misdeeds. Some of the shots such as where the screen moves to a close up of Doctor Mabuse and the rest of the screen is black were new for their time. On two discs ... Read More
Rating: - A German silent cinema masterpiece in restored form
Fritz Lang's brilliantly directed and designed DR. MABUSE: THE GAMBLER (1922, Germany) is one of the crowning achievements of the German silent cinema from the decade following World War One. And Kino Video in Manhattan has given it a magnificent restoration that runs a full four-and-a-half hours. The print is beautiful, way longer than previous versions on home video, and with an evocatively harsh piano and violin score by Aljoscha Zimmermann and ensemble.
Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein ... Read More
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