"Actor: Theo Lingen"

• M - A Film by Fritz Lang | DVD | (06/10/2003) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £19.99

  Fritz Lang's first sound movie, the serial-killer film M, has often been voted the best German film of all time, but, until now, most of us have never seen it properly. What we have seen is a heavily cut 1950s re-edit with extra sound and music patched in, where Lang was deliberately economical with the new technology. This new "Ultimate Edition" is dominated by a marvellous restoration which is true to his intentions and oft-voiced complaints about what had been done to his best film. The young Peter Lorre is terrifyingly ordinary as the child-murderer whom police and criminals hunt down in what is still one of the best forensic police procedurals ever made, while Gustaf Grundgens has effortless charisma as the chief gangster. Lorre's Hollywood exile and decay, and Grundgens' betrayal of old friends and principles under the Nazis, merely add a layer of irony to all this. Lang's ironic cuts--a gangster's gesture is completed by his police equivalent--and dark, studio-bound cinematography make this one of the great precursors of American film noir. Simply, seen without cracks and pops and lines running down the screen, M is revealed as a true classic--a film that shames everything made in its genre since. On the DVD: M on disc has a great deal of documentary material featuring scholars and technicians telling us just how clever they have been in preparing this splendid restoration. The film also comes with a detailed commentary into which has been spliced interview material with Lang talking in English about specific sequences. There is a German-language film interview with Lang in which he talks through his career and re-enacts the interview with Goebbels that led to his exile; an audio interview with Peter Bogdanovich; and an intelligent video critical essay by film historian R Dixon Smith. The restored film is shown in its correct, unusual visual aspect ratio of 1.90:1 and has vivid cleaned-up digital mono sound: the murderer's whistling of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" has never sounded so chilling. --Roz Kaveney

• Das Testament Des Dr Mabuse | Blu Ray | (24/09/2012) from £12.85   |  Saving you £7.14 (55.56%)   |  RRP £19.99

  With the etching onto glass of a single word - MABUSE - Berlin reawakens into a nightmare. Fritz Lang's electrifying Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) is the astonishing second instalment in the German master's legendary Mabuse series, a film that puts image and sound into an hypnotic arrangement unlike anything seen or heard in the cinema before - or since.It's been eleven years since the downfall of arch-criminal and master-of-disguise Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), now sequestered in an asylum under the watchful eye of one Professor Baum (Oskar Beregi). Mabuse exists in a state of catatonic graphomania, his only action the irrepressible scribbling of blueprints that would realise a seemingly theoretical Empire of Crime. But when a series of violent events courses through the city, police and populace alike start asking themselves with increasing panic: Who is behind all this?! The answer borders on the realm of the impossible...

• Das Testament Des Dr Mabuse | Blu Ray | (24/09/2012) from £21.58   |  Saving you £8.41 (38.97%)   |  RRP £29.99

  With the etching onto glass of a single word - MABUSE - Berlin reawakens into a nightmare. Fritz Lang's electrifying Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) is the astonishing second instalment in the German master's legendary Mabuse series, a film that puts image and sound into an hypnotic arrangement unlike anything seen or heard in the cinema before - or since.It's been eleven years since the downfall of arch-criminal and master-of-disguise Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), now sequestered in an asylum under the watchful eye of one Professor Baum (Oskar Beregi). Mabuse exists in a state of catatonic graphomania, his only action the irrepressible scribbling of blueprints that would realise a seemingly theoretical Empire of Crime. But when a series of violent events courses through the city, police and populace alike start asking themselves with increasing panic: Who is behind all this?! The answer borders on the realm of the impossible...

• The Testament Of Dr Mabuse | DVD | (22/03/2004) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £22.99

  The Testament of Dr Mabuse is Fritz Lang's sequel to his flamboyant Dr Mabuse two-part epic of the 1920s, this time adding subtle use of sound to the creepy effects developed for the earlier film. Once a Moriarty-like mastermind, the haggard Dr M (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) has become an autistic asylum inmate who scrawls plans for daring crimes in his cell and exerts an unhealthy influence on his psychiatrist. Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke), the jolly policeman from Lang's M, is puzzled by a series of daring crimes that bear the Mabuse signature, and a gang of thugs take instructions from a shadowy figure who claims after the doctor's death to be Mabuse reborn and is staging a reign of crime apparently designed to bring about the ruin of all law-abiding society. Though it works best as a textbook thriller, some commentators, including Lang, suggested that the pulp plot was intended to allegorise the evil influence of the Nazi party, with a crime boss who rants like Hitler. The many impressive set-pieces still work, too: the pursuit of a spy through a grinding print-works, an assassination at a traffic light, hero and heroine trapped in a room with a bomb and cutting a water main to flood their way to freedom, the persecution of the asylum head by a phantom of his patient, and a last-reel night-time chase. On the DVD: The Testament of Dr Mabuse on disc is accompanied by a 15-minute illustrated essay on the film and its history. There are English subtitles. --Kim Newman

• M | DVD | (13/09/1999) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99

  Peter Lorre made film history with his startling performance as a psychotic murderer of children. Too elusive for the Berlin police, the killer is sought and marked by underworld criminals who are feeling the official fallout for his crimes. This riveting, 1931 German drama by Fritz Lang--an early talkie--unfolds against a breathtakingly expressionistic backdrop of shadows and clutter, an atmosphere of predestination that seems to be closing in on Lorre's terrified villain. M is an important piece of cinema's past along with a number of Lang's early German works, including Metropolis and Spies. (Lang eventually brought his influence directly to the American cinema in such films as Fury, They Clash by Night and The Big Heat.) M shouldn't be missed. This original 111-minute version is a little different from what most people have seen in the cinema. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com

• The Charm of La Boheme (Zauber Der Boheme) (Eggerth) | DVD | (04/07/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £18.99

  The Charm of La Boheme (Zauber der Boheme)