We’ve just received info that the final instalment in Fritz Lang’s ‘Dr. Mabuse’ trilogy, The Thousand Eyes Of Dr. Mabuse will arrive on Blu-ray for the first time as a part of The Masters of Cinema Series from 11 May 2020.
After enjoying fantastic success with Fritz Lang’s two-part “Indian Epic” in 1959, German producer Artur Brauner signed the great director to direct one more film. The result would be the picture that, in closing the saga he began nearly forty years earlier, brought Lang’s career full-circle, and would come to represent his final celluloid testament—by extension: his final film masterpiece.
The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse [Die 1000 Augen des Dr. Mabuse] finds that diabolical Weimar name resurfacing in the Cold War era, linked to a new methodology of murder and mayhem. Seances, assassinations, and Nazi-engineered surveillance tech—all abound in Lang’s paranoid, and ultimate, filmic labyrinth.
One of the great and cherished “last films” in the history of cinema, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse provides a stylistic glimpse into the 1960s works on such subjects as sex-crime, youth-culture, and LSD that Lang would unfortunately never come to realise. Nonetheless, Lang’s final film remains an explosive, and definitive, closing statement.
LIMITED EDITION O-CARD SLIPCASE [First Print Run of 2000 copies only]
1080p presentation on Blu-ray
Original German soundtrack
Optional English audio track, approved by Fritz Lang
Optional English subtitles
Feature-length audio commentary by film-scholar and Lang expert David Kalat
2002 interview with Wolfgang Preiss
Alternate ending
Reversible sleeve featuring newly commissioned and original poster artwork
PLUS: a collector’s booklet featuring a new essay by Philip Kemp; vintage reprints of writing by Lang; an essay by David Cairns; notes by Lotte Eisner on Lang’s final, unrealised projects