The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse) is a 1933 movie by director Fritz Lang, his second sound film, and the second to feature the villain Dr. Mabuse (if the first, Dr. Mabuse der Spieler, is counted as one movie in two parts rather than as two films). Many modern filmmakers, including Claude Chabrol, have named Testament as the movie which inspired them in turn to make films.

Synopsis

The film begins with the continuous, cacophonous roar of machinery, as the camera moves slowly through a cluttered workshop of some kind, and finally pans down to show us a clearly nervous young man hiding behind a large trunk with a gun in his hand. Workmen in the shop become aware of his presence, but allow him to think he is leaving undetected until he is outside, when they try to kill him by dropping masonry on him from a great height, and by rolling a barrel at him that explodes upon impact, "accidents" he narrowly avoids.

The next scene fades in with Inspector Lohmann (played by Otto Wernicke ) singing opera music as he prepares to leave for the day. His departure is interrupted by a call from the young man we saw in the previous scene, who turns out to be a disgraced police detective named Hofmeister. Despite Lohmann's angry hanging-up, Hofmeister, wound-up and jumping at shadows, calls back trying to tell Lohmann he's been following a huge criminal conspiracy, much larger than the mere counterfeiting ring he at first thought it to be, and he's finally learned the name of the head man who controls the operation. However, before he can disclose the name, Hofmeister's pursuers catch up to him; the lights go out; shots are fired in the dark, and Lohmann frantic calls for Hofmeister to answer him are finally met ... with the sound of Hofmeister over the phone, singing.

More to come...

Themes and subtexts

The film is a sophisticated work, and perhaps the most successful movie in the series. It was only Lang's second sound film (the first being M) but its use of sound was highly advanced; a repeated motif in the film is sound that is misidentified by either the characters or the audience (a pocketwatch spring unwinding, intended to simulate a telephone's ring; a gunshot masked by the sound of car horns; a ticking that seems to be a bomb until we see the spoon tapping on an eggshell). It's a motif that fits neatly in with a larger theme of unsuccessful communication of all kinds. Lang also drew on the success of M by bringing back its police detective hero, Inspector Lohmann, to pursue Mabuse.

The French version

Testament was an extremely early sound film, and the cost of adding sound to a movie was still expensive; it was so expensive, in fact, that it was cheaper to actually film the same script with a different cast in a different language than to redub the German version into some other language. This was done with Testament; a German version and a French version were shot at the same time, using the same sets, but with two different casts. The only two actors who appeared in both movies were Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Mabuse), who had few lines, and Karl Meixner (Hofmeister), who spoke both German and French.

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