In a way this film is the original “serial” film. It establishes the serial nature of a crime based storyline with a protagonist who is up against arch-nemesis, villains of various methods and costumes, villains that we think disappear in one episode and then return later, and with the main character always representing the fight for good against evil although with a murky grey line when his personal life is at stake in the fight.
One of the greatest aspects of this serial is establishing the trope of the “sidekick”. There is a character, Mazamette who embodies the nature of a sidekick. He is comic relief, he is the deus ex machina who shows up in the nick of time to save the hero from certain doom. He is the foil to the tightly wound, and buttoned up hero.
He is Robin. Very much this film series predates and anticipates comic book and detective serial lore. Batman and Robin borrow heavily from the dynamic of Phillipe and Mazamette. Even detective storylines in the 30’s borrow very heavily from the notion of a main character who is not a police officer but peripherally related to the police and help solves their crimes. In a way, it is heavily borrowing from the Sherlock Holmes novels from before and very much is tapping into that storytelling precedent in literature and translating it to the screen.
In that process we see the use of massive stunts, and high concept dangers/gimmicks/weapons/stratagems. The villains go to great lengths to destroy their foes and what is remarkable with this film is the realistic brutality of the villain’s crimes. As I’ve mentioned this early period in silent film seems to be the most honest, acknowledging the harsh realities of the human world of the day. There is very little rounding of edges, death is real, characters die, they get kidnapped, beaten, shot, and conned. Human nature is self-serving, foolish, and somewhat sadistic at times and that is seen very clearly in this film.
In Batman and Robin they obviously downplay the gratuitious violence, but that is honestly a result of the introduction of censorship laws with the Hays Code, whereas this time period didn’t really see that level of censorship so it’s interesting to see how our natural state is to understand our own brutality but society as a mechanism attempts to insulate us with political tools to prevent us from seeing our own true nature or acknowledging it.
It’s very interesting as the film was panned by critics and police alike for being morally dubious and encouraging violence when it was just displaying to the audience exactly what was going on in the world. This was later viewed as part of the breakdown of the bourgeoisie and aristocratic way of Europe that WW1 was knocking over.
The film took crime serials as literature and helped throw onto screen and make that genre viable for the directors of the 20s and 30s.
The series is definitely an influence on The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, especially in the brutality and honesty of the crimes themselves. What’s amazing is that Fellaide didn’t intend for this to be an artistic masterpiece but just commercial product which it was and which also incidentally reflected more realistic “art” back to the viewer than the “artistic” products of the day.
Hitchcock definitely took a lot from this film, primarily because Lang did for Testament, and then the gangster pictures of the late 20’s and early 30’s already had a lineage started from this film to hop off of and make their pictures.