aka The FBI Versus Dr Mabuse; The Phantom Fiend
(Im Stahlnetz des Dr. Mabuse)
West Germany/France/Italy. 1961.
Crew
Director – Harald Reinl, Screenplay – Marc Behm & Ladislaus Fodor, Producer – Artur Brauner, Photography (b&w) – Karl Löb, Music – Peter Sandloff, Production Design – Otto Erdmann & Hans Jürgen Kiebach. Production Company – CCC Film Produktion G.M.B.H./Criterion Films S.A./S.P.A. Cinematografica.
Cast
Gert Frobe (Commissioner Lohmann), Lex Barker (Joe Como), Daliah Lavi (Maria Sabrehm), Tausto Tozzi (Warden Wolf), Rudolf Fernau (Father Briefenstein), Werner Peters (Böhmler), Joachim Mock (Detective Voss), Ady Berber (Alberto Sandro), Rudolf Forster (Professor Julius Sabrehm), Wolfgang Preiss (Dr Mabuse), Henry Coubert (Anton Heiber), Laura Solari (Mrs Pizarro)
Plot
Commissioner Lohmann is sent to investigate after an international courier and his contact both end up killed. Clues lead Lohmann to a prison where he discovers that mind control drugs are being employed to turn the inmates into killers. In investigating, Lohmann meets journalist Maria Sabrehm whose scientist father is missing, along with Joe Como who says he is an FBI agent but is actually working for the Chicago mob and has come seeking to contact the person behind the scheme. As attempts are made to warn Lohmann away and blow him up, Lohmann realises he is up against his old nemesis Dr Mabuse, who he thought was dead.
Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (1922) was a hit for director Fritz Lang. Based on a novel by a novel by Luxembourger writer Norbert Jacques. Lang’s film was an extravagant crime drama in two-parts that starred Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the titular criminal mastermind manipulating the fates of people and controlling minds with the power of his will. It proved a huge hit. In the sound era, Lang made a sequel with The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933) but this displeased Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels and Lang subsequently fled to take refuge in France and then the USA. Three decades later, Lang returned to what was now West Germany and followed his earlier works up with The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960), which would be his last film.
The rights to Dr Mabuse were then taken up by the German production company CCC Film Produktion, who made a further series of films beginning with The Return of Dr Mabuse here and to be followed by The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1962), The Invisible Dr Mabuse/The Invisible Horror (1962), Dr Mabuse vs Scotland Yard (1964) and The Death Ray of Dr Mabuse/The Secret of Dr Mabuse (1964). All but the last featured Wolfgang Preiss playing Dr Mabuse. Gert Frobe played Inspector Lohmann from 1000 Eyes through to The Testament of Dr Mabuse.
The Return of Dr Mabuse was the first of the films that continued the Dr Mabuse saga without Fritz Lang’s involvement. There is still continuity to 1000 Eyes in the casting of Gert Frobe as Inspector Lohmann. This was a handful of years before Frobe became internationally famous as the title role in the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964). Frobe is positively boisterous in the part at times. This was made as an international co-production and so we also get American actor Lex Barker, a former Tarzan, who plays a possibly duplicitous FBI agent, along with a mix of German, French and Italian actors.
Missing scientists Daliah Lavi and Commissioner Lohmann (Gert Frobe)(l to r) FBI agent Joe Como (Lex Barker) and Commissioner Lohmann (Gert Frobe)
The Return of Dr Mabuse plays out as far more of a Police Procedural than Lang’s Mabuse films, which were very much absorbed in the mood and atmosphere of their world. It is not always a plot that stitches together in the most plausible ways – Daliah Lavi turns up as a curious reporter and it just so happens that her father has been abducted to create the mind control drug; Lohmann visits a prison to get help in identifying the murdered courier Mrs Pizarro where it also coincidentally happens that the scheme is being run using the prisoners; while it is not even clear why the two couriers had to be killed at the start.
Surprisingly, Dr Mabuse barely features as a character until right at the end. He’s there more by presence. It is important to remember in the first film that Mabuse was a mastermind who had an actual identity as a psychologist, while in the second film he was placed in an asylum. It is only by the third film that he is rumoured to be dead and thus goes from an actual figure at the centre of the story to a shadowy presence who may or may not still be running things, while later entries in the series deal with his ghost.
Harald Reinl is a more prosaic director than Fritz Lang and lacks Lang’s incredible mood and suspense sequences. That said, he does make 1960s West Berlin look slick and exciting in the black-and-white photography (something that the dvd restoration renders with a superb crispness). The best scene that Reinl pulls off is the one that comes at the climax with Lex Barker and Daliah Lavi trapped inside a cellar as it is being flooded, all of which is intercut with the police mounting an attack on the hideout in a military assault.
Harald Reinl was an Austrian born director who was active in German cinema between the 1950s and 1986 (when he was stabbed to death by his wife). He was noted for a number of Edgar Wallace adaptations that frequently ventured into horror material during the 1960s, including Hand of the Gallows (1960), The Forger of London (1961), The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle (1963), Room 13 (1964) and The Sinister Monk (1965), as well as one further Dr Mabuse sequels The Invisible Dr Mabuse (1962), and other efforts such as The Carpet of Horror (1962), Siegfried (1966) and the Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Torture Chamber of Dr Sadism (1967). His greatest internatonal success was the Erich von Daniken Ancient Astronauts documentary Chariots of the Gods (1970) and its sequel Mysteries of the Gods (1976).
