Doctor Mabuse

Dr. Mabuse is a villainous fictional character, created by Norbert Jacques, but made most famous by the three films German director Fritz Lang made about him over a period of almost forty years. Though the character was designed to deliberately mimic pulp-style villains in the mold of Dr. Fu Manchu and particularly Fantômas, the latter of which was a direct inspiration, Jacques' aim was both to capture the commercial success of such pulp tales and to make political comment on the establishment of the day, in much the same way that the silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had done just a few years previously.

History

Dr. Mabuse first appeared in the novel Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (trans. "Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler") by Norbert Jacques. The novel was the beneficiary of unprecedented publicity efforts and became a best-seller immediately. Fritz Lang, already an accomplished director, worked with his wife Thea von Harbou to translate the novel to the screen, where it also became a huge hit. (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (1922) is technically a single film with a running time of almost four hours, but in a practice popular at the time, it was released in two separate sections: Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, An Image of the Times and Inferno, People of the Times. This is why some film histories refer to der Spieler as the first Mabuse film, and others refer to the two sections separately, as the first two).

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After the great success of both the novel and the film, it was almost a decade before anything more was done with the character. Jacques had been working on a sequel to the novel, titled Mabuse's Colony, in which Mabuse has died and a group of his followers are starting an island colony based on the principles set out in Mabuse's manifesto. However, the novel was stalled and unfinished. After conversations with Lang and von Harbou, Jacques agreed to shelve the novel and the sequel instead became the 1933 movie Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, in which the Mabuse of 1920 (still played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is a mute prisoner in an insane asylum, but has for some time been obsessively scribbling out meticulous plans for crime and terrorism -- plans that are being carried out by a gang of criminals in the world outside, who receive their orders from a literally shadowy, unknown figure who has identified himself to them only as Dr. Mabuse.

Related Topics:
Manifesto - 1933 - Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse - Rudolf Klein-Rogge - Insane asylum - Terrorism

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