Dr Mabuse: The Gambler

This 1922 masterpiece, the two part four and a half Fritz Lang silent epic, is one of the great movies.
We start off with some wonderful scenes, episodic in the way it has the tales as this Mabuse character operates in different roles. We have some questions of identity, of evil, of doubles; who is Mabuse? Are they all Mabuse? These questions gain traction as it goes on, it is a question about the move towards the end of Weimar Germany. The scenes are of great drama, they raise fascinatingly movements of the will. The idea of Mabuse turning those he manipulates into robots, the terror of the loss of the will, is also brilliantly conveyed. Our favourite scene, by the by, is perhaps the stock market scene. As the penguin-like man rises above, we have a moment of terrifying, sublime transcendence.
The characters change as it goes on, Mabuse becomes more absurd, becomes more made up. Throughout, the female characters are heavily made up, most effectively portrayed by the relentless high tone lighting, that shines on the blacks and makes a mask of the face. The idea of the robot among men, the automaton, returns.
The atmosphere is evoked of a dirty morally compromised turn towards pure evil, the wonderful expressionist sets. Yet this film is smarter than that. In part Two we learn our characters more, we see how Wenk and Mabuse are similar (characterisation is important throughout; Lang is keen on his P.O.V. shots). We learn to sympathise with Mabuse, his desperate excesses. Sometimes, for one second it goes quiet; Went lays Cardozza down, Told wanders through his mansion, going to madness.
This is a straioghtforward masterpiece, desperately exciting, beautiful to look at, sublime in its scale and scope. We have barely touched on the masterful nature of the work in this piece. Perfect?