This staggering thriller is a triumph of abstraction, and the
surrealist masterpiece of Lang's silent period. Virtually a
compendium of Langian themes and motifs - the blind man who can see; the
master criminal digesting information like a supercomputer - its
extraordinary convoluted plot pits law against outlaw in a struggle of
increasing desperation where the antagonists become virtually
indistinguishable. Like Dr Mabuse, it foreshadows Hitler; but more
than any other Lang silent, it recognises that power equates with
control over information. Still a modern film, then, and one of the
cinema's most astonishing pulp fictions.
