Torture is a delicate art. You must learn when to stop. You can't learn anything from a corpse.
After unconscionably overlooking it last week, I doubled back to cover 1962's The Invisible Dr. Mabuse, the actual follow-up to his Return. Like that film, it was directed by Harald Reinl from a screenplay by Ladislas Fodor, but instead of Inspector Lohmann, this one brings back the character of smug FBI agent Joe Como, again played by Lex Barker. And Wolfgang Preiss is up to his old tricks -- and some new ones as well -- as the megalomaniacal Mabuse, who wishes to learn the secret of Operation X, which naturally enough turns out to be a method for turning people and things (but mostly people) invisible. And we know the Operation has been a success right off the bat because the opening scene finds an invisible man in a box seat at the theater using opera glasses to enjoy a French Revolution-set operetta entitled Die Tänzerin, der Henker und der Clown ("The Dancer, the Hangman and the Clown"), specifically its lead dancer, Liane Martin (krimi mainstay Karin Dor).
At first glance, the content of the show seems to have been something of an afterthought -- after all, we only ever see its final scene, in which Liane's Dancer, who's dressed like Marie Antoinette, is guillotined by the Hangman -- but during its third and final iteration we're given a closeup of the Hangman that suggests the anonymous stage actor lurking underneath the hood is none other than Mabuse himself. As for the Clown, under the greasepaint he's played by familiar krimi face Werner Peters, who's first seen hanging around backstage and whose first act is to pump an inquisitive FBI man for information about Operation X and then dispose of his body in a theatrical trunk. That's how Joe Como enters the picture, summoned from America by Inspector Brahm (Siegfried Lowitz), who operates out of the back room of an optometrist's office (much like Barry Convex in Videodrome). It is Brahm who tells him (and us) that Operation X is "more important in its possibilities than the super bomb and space rockets," although he's unable to go into any more detail than that at first.
Shadowed by junior detective Hase (Walo Lüönd), Joe has a meet-cute with Liane at the morgue where they both go to identify the dead agent, who was presumably her boyfriend, even if she's loath to admit it to a total stranger. She does turn to him, though, when the invisible man from the theater box shows up in her dressing room and is later found to be answering the phone in her apartment, making him the creepiest stalker ever. Meanwhile, Joe gets the lowdown on the secretive Prof. Erasmus (Rudolf Fernau), the Nobel-winning scientist working on the breaking the visibility barrier, from his assistant, Dr. Bardorf (Kurd Pieritz), who explains the principles of invisibility in a way that almost sounds halfway plausible. No points, by the way, for guessing who Liane's invisible stalker turns out to be, although I appreciated Reinl and Fodor's decision to put him in a rubber bodysuit when he finally reveals himself.
As with most of Mabuse's exploits from this period, his master plan for world domination isn't nearly as diabolical (or well thought out) as he probably thinks it is. After all, his army of invisible soldiers is defeated by policemen armed with giant paint-sprayers. (It's a shame Reinl didn't include an insert of the paint-covered men getting rounded up, although I suppose most of them do get shot down the moment they're exposed.) And the doctor's fate is a given knowing he has to go mad and get locked up in an asylum so he can write his Testament, but I found the shots of his latex mask melting off his face as Prof. Erasmus's laboratory goes up in flames around him to be rather eerie. Plausibility may never be this series' strong suit, but it can generally be counted on to deliver some spectacular imagery.