THOUSAND EYES OF DOCTOR MABUSE was Fritz Lang's last film. It transpires in the Germany of 1960, about fifteen years from the end of World War II, yet once again Lang and his collaborators sought to show the vulnerability of ordinary society to master manipulators. There's no serious intimation that Mabuse has come back to life, even though there have been strange new crimes on the rise, like assassinations in which victims are shot with an "iridium needle." Rather, what we have is a Mabuse manqué , though Lang skillfully directs the audience's attention away from the proper suspect. Here, long after the demise of the Third Reich, Lang is able to directly associate the new Mabuse with the tyranny of Nazism, for the "thousand eyes" of the title are a multitude of cameras placed by an old Nazi hotel. With these cameras the would-be Mabuse gathers immense amounts of intelligence with which to manipulate his victims, relying in part on the illusion of his being a psychic to ply his blackmail trade.
I judge that all of the Mabuse films belong to the Fryean mode of "adventure," but only THOUSAND EYES qualifies as what I call a "combative narrative," one which culminates in a violent exchange between formidable forces-- in this case, the minions of Mabuse and the tough Inspector Kras. A few years later Gert Frobe, the actor who played Kras, would play a signature villain now better known than Mabuse, when Frobe essayed GOLDFINGER in 1964.
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