The blind clairvoyant asks intrepid Police Commissioner Kras if an informant has contacted him. “No, he couldn’t call me,” the inspector replies matter-of-factly. “You see, my phone exploded yesterday.” Meanwhile, in San Francisco, dashing adventurer Kay Hoog has just thwarted the plans of the criminal Spiders organization to steal treasures of a lost Inca civilization. When he spurns the advances of the Spiders’ evil vamp Lio Sha, she ominously tells him, “You have rejected Lio Sha’s love. Now fear her hate.”
These are two defining scenes from “The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse” and “The Spiders,” two Fritz Lang classics just released by New York-based Kino on Video in definitive remastered editions.
The films bookend Lang’s legendary career. The crime thriller “The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse” (1960) was his last film, “The Spiders” (1919) his third, and the one that put him on the map.
The Vienna-born Lang, who died in 1976, is perhaps best known for the seminal sci-fi film “Metropolis” and the chilling portrait of a child killer, “M.” He also made films that are benchmarks of the noir genre, “Fury,” “The Big Heat” and “While the City Sleeps.”
Lang’s swan song, available for the first time on video in German with English subtitles, revisits the criminal genius he introduced in 1922’s “Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler,” and whom he resurrected in the 1932 sequel, “The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse.” The elusive Mabuse is described as a “criminal genius who wanted to shock the world with terrorist acts … establishing a fantastic reign of crime.” He is said to have died in 1932, but someone, it seems, is carrying on his anarchic legacy, hatching a labyrinthine plot to take control of an American industrialist’s arms factories.
Lang’s career arc from silent films to sound, from Germany to Hollywood, paralleled Alfred Hitchcock’s, but as “Mabuse” illustrates, Lang’s thrillers could be grittier and more hard-boiled and pessimistic. A pre-“Goldfinger” Gert Frobe stars as Kras, who dodges assassination attempts as he tries to determine how the blind clairvoyant, a glad-handing insurance agent and a beautiful woman (Dawn Addams, who starred opposite Charlie Chaplin in “A King in New York”) figure into Mabuse’s plans.
“Spiders,” with its shadowy crime organization directed by an unseen evil, anticipates the Mabuse films. Carl de Vogt stars as Kay Hoog, a kind of German Indiana von Jones. He cancels plans to enter a yacht race when he finds a message in a bottle indicating the existence of “unbelievable treasures.” But the Spiders, a cabal of top-hatted gents, also learn of the “inexhaustible” Incan gold mine and dispatch a rival expedition led by the femme fatale Lio Sha.
“Spiders” was part of a series of exotic adventure films that were popular in Germany at the time. It was made in two parts, both of which are included on this video. The first was such a box-office success that Lang was pulled from what was supposed to be his next project, the expressionist classic “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” to direct the sequel.
“The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse” and “Spiders” retail for $25 each. To order, call 800-562-3330.
