This leads us to "The Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse" or "Dr. M schlägt zu", the semi-inofficial entry in the Dr. Mabuse series. Semi-official because the original holder of the rights, CCC-Films, never used the name on this film. And in the german dialogue, Dr. Krenko, the main villain, is only subordinate of an unspecified "Organisation". Anyway, the movie had already been sold to the partners as "Mabuse" movie and so you get the name in basically all foreign versions of this movie.
CCC-Films today do have an own "Jess Franco" category in their "classics" department (so it is "Karl May", "Dr. Mabuse", "(Bryan) Edgar Wallace" AND "Jess Franco" (!!!) on their official website!) and there it is complete with all foreign titles referring to Dr. Mabuse. CCC-Films too give the original working titles as "The Man who called himself Mabuse" and "Mabuse 70".
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| Official CCC-Films archive-card for Dr. M |
The Franchise:
You know him. Let's make it short. Based on a pulp-novel, the first two silent adaptations of Dr. Mabuse by Fritz Lang are absolute milestones of crime-cinema and if you've not watched them by now... come on. There is NO excuse.
Dr. Mabuse is a crime-lord in the booming black markets of defeated germany, he has the power of mind-control and uses various disguises for his deeds. He tries to found an international organisation with the money gained by his crimes.
Aim of the stories and of the first movies is to show how rotten the capitalistic society was. These are highly political films, with the third, the talkie "Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse" actually replacing Mabuse with Hitler, the movie cannot be released and director Lang went to the US on a long vacation until 1950....
Let's play word-memory: Black Market / Crime Lord / Mind Control / Defeated Germany/ Better World/ International Organisation
CCC was founded by Arthur Brauner AND Joseph Einstein who was THE DON of Berlin's black markets after WWII. And Arthur Brauner only gets the licence for filming by the american occupiers under the obligation to re-educate the defeated german people with internationally produced movies and all will life in a better world.
I do NOT make these things up. I just draw the line between the dots!!
No wonder, Brauner was keen to do a Mabuse film. He obtained the rights and even got Fritz Lang to do a fourth movie (The 1000 Eyes - which is not based on an original Mabuse story but rather on the very obscure "Mr. Tott kauft 1000 Augen" (transl: "Mr. Deass buys a 1000 eyes" by Jan Fethke, written in Esperanto!!!!!! and published in German 1932)).
Before Lang decided to do "1000 Eyes", the first Mabuse script was a direct sequel to "Testament" called "Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse" (sic!), so this script is around since 1954!
After that, Lang does not want to do another one, so Brauner just takes the usual suspects of Krimi-entertiainment through 5-6 more movies, including a team-up with Bryan Edgar Wallace. All have a certain SF-element in them and gadgetry ("invisible rays") and Mabuse is using super-advanced technology. The last one as a thinly veiled James-Bond wannebe.
Please note that after 1933's "Testament", the real Dr. Mabuse is actually dead, only his spirit is set free in the world and through mind-control he now controls subordinate "master-criminals".
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| You might be wondering why the figure for the french release of "Death Rays" is missing. As the CNC only records the top 30 of each month, some movies drop off the charts unnoticed. I would assume a figure somewhere between 200.000 and 250.000 would be a sensible suggestion. |
The series has a steady but stable decrease in ticket sales and did well in foreign markets, obviously due to the prestigious name. Brauner stopped 1964 after "Death Rays of Dr. Mabuse" but with over 1.200.000 million tickets sold, this was still going strong. He had cut down his BEW-franchise the same year but that last movie "7th Victim" at least had had very low box-office returns.
I do not see a reason for Brauner stopping the Mabuse-Franchise commercially. Getting in lots of co-financers from foreign fiefdoms (ha!) the financial risk was not big and Spain was virtually begging him to finally produce "Die Rache"/La Venganca, a scipt that had been lying around since before the 1st Mabuse film...
Maybe Brauner wanted to get out of the B-movie bracket that the BEW and Mabuse-Films had been. From 1965 to 1968 he would do big budgeted color-scope movies that did cost a lot of money like the Nibelungen-Remake, Kampf um Rom (A Fight for Rome) and 5 oriental Karl-May extravaganzas with whom he tried to fight the Rialto-Karl-May-Western success.
All of these were intended to make Brauner, who - basically - had been a smut-peddler, an honorable man. Kampf um Rom was the biggest budgeted german movie up to this point but failed to reach the 1.000.000 ticket sales that the last Mabuse easily had trespassed. Brauner later fumed that he could have "produced 10 Wallace movies with the money spent on Fight for Rome". So he was regretting pulling out of these franchises and maybe decided to get back in again with Jess Franco on his side.
The Living Corpses of Dr. Mabuse (1971)
A curiosum inside the "Mabuse"-franchise is that Berlin-born Gordon Hessler's "Scream and Scream Again" was marketed as "Dr. Mabuse" film in Germany in 1971 (!). This could only have been done if Artur Brauner had sold or sub-licensed the rights to the name at that point. "Scream and Scream again" boasts the magnificent german title of "Dr. Mabuse's Living Corpses"I have already checked into this anomaly very deeply and found some very interesting facts but that will be something for the future.... just trust me:
Scream and Scram again IS a real Mabuse-film!
Obviously there was still flesh on the rotting corpse of Mabuse.
Case opened: Dr. M schlägt zu ("Dr. M strikes") / Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse
-or-
Plan 10 from Dr. M
Obviously A. Brauner had fun too, rewriting the script for the german version, our supervillain is called "Dr. Franco" (script), although in the actual dub he called Dr. Cranko/Krenko
Plot: This is as bad as it can get. There is virtually nothing here except that it is something about a device used to get a deadly weapon and therefor we have to kill/kidnap some people which our trusty Andros - the one from Franco's "Secreto del Dr. Orloff "(1964) does (Andros here looks stiched together...so he is obviously one of the superhuman "living corpses" that Dr. Browning had created in "Scream and Scream again"....).
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| Andros, still crazy after all these years |
"Secreto del Dr. Orloff" was relased as "Die Lebenden Leichen des Dr. Jeckyll" (Living Corpses of Dr. Jekyll") in Germany. See what I mean with the name-game?
I tried to try. I tried to care. But I could not help it. This is Plan 10 from Dr. M.
Man. It sucks, in a big way.
If you really, really want to see some Dr. Mabuse in it, maybe it is from the "Chemiker Null" novel but this is just about stealing secrets from a scientist. So not much flesh in here.
The problem is that it did not need to. Photography is fine to stunning (with some occasional lapses) but acting and script are below the lowest par on every level. This feels like an Ed Wood movie. I honestly do not know what Franco tried here. A complete lack of stars doing their least to hide their desintrest. This is all ridiculous but not in a funny way.Charades, charades.
As with the movie, the title and the distribution, the actors play charades. Siegfried Lowitz, who had already played in a Dr. Mabuse movie and was a staple face of the Krimis but no-one to draw crowds, here has to play a completely different character (Prof. Dr. Orloff (!)) for a day (maybe less - obviously he owed this to Brauner as he had he had dropped out of the movie business in 1965 to work exclusively for TV). Lowitz dubbed himself too in this movie, which would mean that a theatrical release was planned. Overall the dubbing, though done by professionals (the german actors here dubbed themselves), seems rushed, as if there had not been any second takes.
The actors behave as if they do not have a clue what's going on and frankly I believe them. I'm with sheriff Thomas who intentionally does not get at all what this movie is about.
It does not help that Brauner again uses the same score he had already reused for "Deadly Avenger", taken from previous year's sleaze-crime-fest "Perrak". This whole thing just feels wrong.
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Franco had held back this movie for over a year before handing it over to Brauner, for reasons unknown. When he finally could lay eyes on the product he had produced, Brauner was said to be furious. Instead of using the script given to him, Franco had just made another Orloff-movie.
It could well be that Franco had used the money given to him by Brauner to remake his own "Secreto" and then just delivered that in an audacious move that quickly ended the collab.
From the title "Dr. M" it is clear that Brauner did not want to use the "Mabuse" license he had optained from N. Jacques. Putting it on the movie would have cost him 1000 DM in license fee, which would today amount to around 2000 US-$ maybe even more. As a business man he would have calculated the costs against an additional income through the use of the name. And having no star-power (or anything else) to lure people in, he simply let it be. Maybe he was even fearful of Fritz Lang, the man who co-created the movie character of Mabuse together with Norman Jacques back in the 20ies. I don't know.
On an interesting note, although Jacques did own the rights to his creation it is said that Fritz Lang and his then-wife Thea von Harbou (Metropolis) held similar rights to the movie-character of Dr. Mabuse which meant that he had a say in forthcoming movies with Mabuse. But there is just one source about that.
That decision must have been made early as the original german opening titles have the new name properly displayed. Brauner obviously did not want or could not use the name here.
Does it matter? No. This movie has nothing to do with Dr. Mabuse.
If the premiere of this movie actually took place on Dec. 26 in Berlin's very cosy Capitol Theatre I expect that half of the audience would have walked out. I am not aware of the ownership of this theatre back then, but I would not be the least surprised that it belonged to Brauner somehow and that it was just just a test-screening and no official premiere as no poster or other material proving a german release is available anywhere.
This movie release was so rushed (Board of Censors certificate on 20th Dec!, "release" 26th Dec) and then buried that suspicion arises. Cooperation with Jess Franco was abruptly terminated and the release of the last BEW-franchise movie "The Etruscan kills again" was on Dec .31st of 1972.
Brauner stated that "he never had any problem of any kind at any time with Jess Franco" but Franco did not touch German soil in 1972 and for some years later...
In the 1990s, when Dr. M finally appeared on the surface in Germany, the heirs to N. Jacques sued Brauner for using "Mabuse" on this film (yes, they sued him for the 1000 DM). The court however ruled in Brauner's favour that the Mabuse license option had not been drawn on this film.
So it is officially (and court-proven) not part of the Mabuse-franchise.
The spanish version, which is significantly different though, was marketed as "Vengeance of Dr. Mabuse", the old title that already had been sold to the spanish market in the 1960s on the script with the same name, that was not used in this movie.
Verdict:
Acquittal
Did he kill "Mabuse" off? No, because the movie in question is not a "Mabuse" movie. If it were, though, Franco surely would have killed Mabuse as profitable franchise once and for all. This is more in the vein of his relapses on "Fu Manchu" and "Edgar Wallace" -- too meaningless to have any impact at all.
Cliffhanger: I don't make these things up, I just draw the lines between the dots. And one dot is a certain "Dr. M", who is not the fictional character of Dr. Mabuse but a real-life person/villain/crime-lord that actively pushed the low-budget german cinema industry over the edge in 1972. Certain things make sense, like Franco not setting a foot into germany from the end of 1971 and Brauner, clearing it all off in Dec. 1972.... but you, my dear readers have to be patient. This will still take me a year or so to fully research this complex situation.
Why did Brauner stop Mabuse in 1964 although returns were not bad at all?
Why did AIP shoot two obvious Mabuse movies while co-producing "De Sade" with CCC? (yes, two!)
Why did the METROPOL (name of the theatre of "Invisible Dr. Mabuse") distributor call Gordon Hessler's Ninja-epic "Pray for death" "1000 Eyes of the Ninja" in Gemany????
Man, I am curious... I will tackle all of these questions when I get back to "Scream and Scream again", but for now, let's continue our journey:
Jess Franco did not set a foot an German soil after 1971 and purely coincidentally sleazemonger EC Dietrich had just retreated to neutral and tax-havenly Switzerland. So after a brief stay in France (and lots of accumulated depths by Franco) both teamed up to try to feast on another film-series. Next time we have:
Jess Franco vs. The Strangler
Here is a list of the books I used (besides many, many websites with singular information):
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| Peter Osterried's big format, colorfully illustrated Hardcover from 2011 is complete with stunning photos. A bit lightweight on the actual background of the moves. All Dr. Mabuse movies are covered. Essential. |
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| This is edited by one Solveig Wrage, a semiprofessional publication but with lots of real archival material. If you want to know who wrote what to whom and when, then that's the book to go for, very lightweight on the "why" and simply nonchalentely omits all non Lang/CCC movies. |
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| Good english language overview by Holger Haase, basically summarising all you need to know. Excellent value for the money asked by amazon kindle. Holger got his own, worthwile blog here: https://krimifilm.blogspot.com |
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