Doctor mabusa was a gambler who hypnotized the people he gambled with, and therefore tended to win all the time. Nothing stood in his quest for power and money through gambling of various sorts. He plays with stock market, shares, with money, with cards, with people and their destinies. And is as actually, this gives us tis a tis enticing idea of the similarity between the character of doctor mabusa and the role of the film director. So the way that mabusa has power over all the characters and conjures up these fantastic images and visions.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian-born film director Fritz Lang (1890-1976), who was one of the most celebrated film-makers of the 20th century. He worked first in Weimar Germany, creating a range of films including the startling and subversive Mabuse the Gambler and the iconic but ruinously expensive Metropolis before arguably his masterpiece, M, with both the police and the underworld hunting for a child killer in Berlin, his first film with sound. The rise of the Nazis prompted Lang's move to Hollywood where he developed some of his Weimar themes in memorable and disturbing films such as Fury and The Big Heat.
With
Stella Bruzzi
Professor of Film and Dean of Arts and Humanities at University College London
Joe McElhaney
Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York
And
Iris Luppa
Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the Division of Film and Media at London South Bank University
Producer: Simon Tillotson