Best known for M and Metropolis, director Fritz Lang made this intriguingly offbeat 1933 thriller just before fleeing Nazi Germany—and small wonder he had to. Though the Nazis supposedly offered him a chance to run Hitler’s film industry, they couldn’t have liked the parallels Testament drew between its titular villain, an insane criminal genius, and Der Fuehrer. Besides its political daring, Testament was a forward-looking piece of cinematic art, bridging German expressionism and the later styles of Alfred Hitchcock and the James Bond-style spy thriller. And the character of Mabuse himself, who runs a shadowy crime empire from an asylum cell, is an exemplar of the line of fictional evil masterminds stretching from Moriarty to Hannibal Lecter. Criterion’s two-disc DVD is jam-packed with extra goodies—interviews, a fresh English translation, and production-design sketches—that nearly comprise a film-school seminar of their own.
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse: The Criterion Collection
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