SCOTLAND YARD VS. DR. MABUSE (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

I saw the six "new Mabuse" films of the 1960s out of order, so in my review of the sixth and last in the series, I didn't follow how the filmmakers had altered the usual practice of having a star villain return again and again without significant alteration.

In my review of the film that precedes this one, TERROR OF DOCTOR MABUSE, I noted how the filmmakers chose to derive that movie's script from Fritz Lang's 1933 TESTAMENT OF DOCTOR MABUSE, which concluded his original series by having Mabuse die, though his criminal career was taken up by a doctor whom Mabuse brainwashed. TERROR closely follows that template. However, I have no memory that the film definitely stated that "sixties Mabuse" had died, so I didn't comment on that matter in the review. The fifth film in the series, however, makes this indubitably clear. Wolfgang Preiss, who had essayed the role of Mabuse in the other four films, appears in SCOTLAND only as a specter in the mind of Professor Pohland (Walter Rilla), the man who now carries out the dead super-criminal's projects. Whereas in TERROR Pohland was usually concealed by shadows. But in SCOTLAND he's very open about walking around in front of his gang-members and claiming to be Mabuse, and none of the crooks have any problems with it.

SCOTLAND was the only one of the sixties Mabuse films that adapted a published novel for the skeleton of its plot. Bryan Edgar Wallace, son of the famed British writer Edgar Wallace, had just published the second and last of his novels featuring MI-6 agent Bill Tern, and all SCOTLAND did was to make the novel's main villain a secondary figure, whose super-weapon Mabuse co-opts. Amusingly, though the German language version of SCOTLAND pronounces the novel-villain's name "George Cockston" correctly, the subtitled version I saw alter the name to "Lockston."

At any rate, New Mabuse breaks Cockston out of prison and gets hold of his marvelous invention, a mind-control ray. To be sure, the ray has range limitations, so most of Mabuse's  schemes involve sending his agents around with cameras, brainwashing people by focusing the disguised ray-devices on them. Bill Tern, here a policeman from Scotland Yard, is called to Germany to consult on the disappearance of Cockston, but he spends a great deal of time fighting Mabuse's agents and finally coming up with a means to counter the power of the devices.

At the movie's end, Pohland is captured, and he apparently does not remember the things Mabuse's hypnosis made his do. I don't believe the convolutions of "New Mabuse" are even addressed in the sixth and last film.

This entry, directed by Paul May, is an efficient but not especially compelling thriller, though it has some nice human touches one would never see in the slightly later Eurospy flicks.