Word: lange
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...FRITZ LANG'S most brilliant act was the creation of Dr. Mabuse. Esteemed psychologist, master-mind counterfeiter, Mabuse prowled fast society "to play with men's lives and men's souls." Disguised as a smooth-faced young compulsive or a solid English gentleman, he gained admission to private gambling clubs and forced men with his eyes to play millions of marks into his hands. Made up as Dr. Weltmann in long seraggly hair and beard, he conducted public demonstrations of hypnosis that almost succeeded in doing away with his arch-enemy, detective de Witt. Undisguised he discarded the women...
...inventing this super-hero Lang created an adventure film whose marvels illustrated a deep and true vision of life. He refused to people Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) with the cardboard Bonds and Flints of today's adventure fantasies. Every character is a complex personality. In one gambling house de Witt, hunting "the Great Unknown," is distracted by the sight of an extraordinary woman, the Countess Tolst. He leaves the card table to walk to the couch on which she reposes. In two minutes Lang gives us her soul. We see no shallow temptress, no abstract sentimental heroine. The countess...
...only director really dealing with human intelligence, Lang consructed for Mabuse deep sets whose fantastic decor reveals the imaginations of the characters. The Countess's extremely broad and deep rooms are filled with African masks and huge primitive statues which she wonderfully explains in the words, "My brother is a cubist." We immediately sense a world, not exactly that of the early twenties on the Continent, but informed with the essence of that time. The mood current among the rich, joining malaise to brilliant cultivation, typifies a dying upper class that feels no threat in extinction. Their easy lives...
DURING THE ten years between this and the second Mabuse Lang's dramatic construction and visual style underwent radical changes, changes basically of social perspective. Leaving films full of personalities, he began to make long-shot Expressionist dramas without real characters: the two Nibelungen movies and Metropolis. Abandoning these fatalistic myth-abstractions, he returned in M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1932) to films that treated social reality directly in the actions of a few closely connected characters...
Outrage Again. There have been other American atrocities in Viet Nam. Ten Marines were prosecuted in 1967 after a nighttime rampage in Xuan Ngoc in which two women were raped and a family of five killed. Daniel Lang's Casualties of War describes the kidnap-rape-murder of a young girl by four G.I.s in 1966. Yet such incidents are only a small part of the mosaic of brutality for which both sides are responsible. Terror is a principal Viet Cong tactic. So far this year, by actual count, the Communists have killed 5,754 civilians, wounded...