 The great Fritz
Lang was 70 and feeble when he directed this last film, but it's
a complicated moody thriller that has gained lots of admirers in
recent years. Mabuse, the deformed super-criminal from Lang's
movies of the twenties, lives in a fortress of a Berlin hotel
built by the Gestapo, and from there he controls lives and orders
murders through an elaborate system of cameras (the "thousand
eyes" of the title). Peter Van Eyck plays the American tycoon
drawn to the hotel by the beautiful but suicidal Dawn Addams, and
together they are drawn into Mabuse's world of assassinations,
shootings, canine attacks, exploding telephones, and other
oddities of mayhem that climax in an excellent high-speed chase
on the autobahn. With Gert Frobe, Wolfgang Preiss. Written by
Lang and Heinz Oskar Wuttig, from an idea by Jan Fethke.
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