Fritz Lang's Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (1922)

Doktor Mabuse, der Spieler was held together by its fervent belief in a top-rotting society threatened by a dark, fantastical conspiracy with one of the cinema's most mesmeric figures at the core:  Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Dr. Mabuse.
-- Patick McGilligan, Fritz Lang:  The Nature of the Beast (St. Martin's 1997)

There is no such thing as love -- there is only desire, and the will to possess what you most desire.
--Dr. Mabuse (script by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang).

Lang's German silent films are shown too seldom and are probably not much watched or appreciated when they are.  But Turner Classic Movies showed Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (the gambler) recently in a lovely print, properly projected.  The film is also titled ein Bild der Zeit (a picture of the time) and quite effectively captures the complicated world of the Weimar era in Germany, where one is greeted at the door of a nightclub with "cards or cocaine?"  Dr. Mabuse is a psychoanalyst with the power to control men's minds, even just by looking at the back of their heads!  He kills very few, rather he convinces his enemies to kill themselves, persuading them they nicht mehr leben (must not live).  He is an extreme example of many of the problems of pre-Nazi Germany, stealing government documents and accelerating inflation by manipulating the stock market and printing counterfeit money.  Dr. Mabuse is pursued by prosecutor von Wenk and they are both in love with Countess Told, whom Mabuse abducts and whose husband he convinces to kill himself.  Mabuse and von Wenk play a cat-and-mouse game similar to that of Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty.

There is certainly an element of expressionism in Lang's film -- Count Told and Mabuse both see ghosts and place names appear in eerie form on the screen -- but much of Lang's four-hour film is quite "realistic," though in a stylized form that reminds one of Griffith, with an emphasis on cross-cutting and irising. The action scenes are particularly effective because of their slow and suspenseful build-up.