Mabuse Lives! LE (Region B) Blu-ray

Features Include : The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, The Return of Dr Mabuse, The Invisible Dr Mabuse, The Testament of Dr Mabuse, Scotland Yard Hunts Dr Mabuse, The Death Ray of Dr Mabuse

Fritz Lang made two of the defining works of early German cinema with Dr Mabuse the Gambler and The Testament of Dr Mabuse, two masterpieces centred on Norbert Jacques’ nefarious literary supervillain. In 1960, Lang was charged by Artur Brauner’s CCC Film with making a third crime thriller centred on the infamous Dr Mabuse, completing a trilogy nearly forty years in the making. A huge success, The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse gave CCC the confidence to launch into an entire series focused on the master criminal between 1960 and 1964, all starring Wolfgang Priess in the title role. All six films are presented here alongside a wealth of new and archival extras.

In Fritz Lang’s final film The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse, the eponymous master of disguise (Priess) re-emerges in the Cold War era after a lengthy absence – and uses all manner of methods to insight murder and mayhem. The Return of Dr Mabuse sees him use brainwashed prison inmates to commit a litany of crimes while evading the German authorities and the FBI. In The Invisible Dr Mabuse, he seeks to use an amazing new invention – a device that renders the user invisible – to his own ends. The Testament of Dr Mabuse – a remake of Lang’s earlier film – has the German police tying themselves in knots as they try to figure out how their adversary could be continuing his reign of terror from inside an asylum. In Scotland Yard Hunts Dr Mabuse, Mabuse’s tentacles begin to creep across the English Channel. Finally, in The Death Ray of Dr Mabuse, the criminal mastermind comes to possess a weapon capable of unleashing untold destruction.

Directed by Fritz Lang, Harald Reinl (The Fellowship of the Frog), Werner Klingler (Police Raid), Paul May (Duel with Death) and Hugo Fregonese (Black Tuesday), the CCC Mabuse series continues Fritz Lang’s legacy while playing into a popular market taste in Germany for adaptations of literary krimis – or crime thrillers – that can also be seen in the enormous popularity of films based upon Edgar Wallace’s novels throughout the 1960s. The Masters of Cinema series is honoured to collect all six of the 1960s Mabuse films together in this set, presented in high definition from new 2K restorations and available for the first time on Blu-ray in the UK.