The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse

A journalist is killed in his car. A clairvoyant comes to the police and says he saw the murder in advance. Nobody takes him seriously, but the man knows the details. The investigation leads to a hotel. The Hotel Luxor was fitted out under the Nazi administration during the war; a camera and a listening device were put in every room, and that system still works. An American businessman and a woman inclined to suicide are staying there. Someone is watching and steering the two of them. The name behind it had long been counted dead. Fritz Lang directs. Peter van Eyck, Gert Fröbe, Wolfgang Preiss and Dawn Addams are in the cast. It is a German, French and Italian co-production, made in 1960. This is Lang's last film; he had begun his career with the Mabuse character and ended it with the same one. The first film with the character was made in the twenties and the second in the thirties; the second was banned in Germany. The matter it treats is surveillance; the hotel's camera system is at its centre and that is a premise set out in 1960. The narrative uses the shape of the crime film and opens its mystery late. The film was found old fashioned on release and was reassessed by the next generation of critics. The narrative says the inheritance of the war years continues; the administration has changed but the equipment is in place. A series of films with the same character followed, but Lang had no part in them. Its limit is the production; the budget is low, the acting uneven, and the narrative simple in places. Who it is for: viewers who like Fritz Lang's cinema and classic crime films. Who it is not for: it is old, plainly made, and the ending conventional.