which spread over the German post[-World War I] screen". Still, despite the Nazi ban of the film, Kracauer is dubious that the average German film-goer would have seen the analogy between Baum/Mabuse's elaborate criminal organization and the Nazis. Reception In 1938, Goebbels wrote that on looking at the film that he was "struck by the dullness of its portrayal, the coarseness of its construction, and the inadequacy of its acting". Despite Goebbels' statement, he would present the film uncensored from time to time in private screening rooms for close personal friends. On the French release, The New York Times wrote that "it is the French version of Fritz Lang's production, "Le Testament du Dr. Mabuse" ("Dr. Mabuse's Will"). It is a hallucinating and horrifying story, depicted with great power and the extraordinary beauty of photography that Lang has led his admirers to expect". At the Hungarian premiere of the German-language print in 1933, Variety wrote that the film "...certainly shows the influence of American mystery pictures. The story is very long-winded and even an ingenious director like Fritz Lang could not prevent its being rather slow-moving in places". Bosley Crowther wrote a negative review in The New York Times on the film's 1943 release, stating that "it is a good, old film, well played and beautifully directed – but a battered antique, none the less". On the 1973 re-release, the same newspaper wrote a positive review of the film, stating that it "yields a sensational torrent of images that almost make the early nineteen-seventies seem tame" and "while this "Mabuse" lacks most of the surrealistic effects and the dazzling hallucinations that gave its predecessor such magic, it's rich in the images and the shocks at which Lang excelled". Some years later, Siegfried Kracauer, writing in From Caligari to Hitler, accuses the film of "repetitious shock effects [which] tend to neutralize each other, [resulting in] monotony rather than an increase in suspense". He deems the film to be inferior to Lang's 1931 film M. Nevertheless, he goes on the describe several sequences in the film which illustrate Lang's "uncanny genius for evoking terror out of the simplest things". He also finds fault with the lack of any strong positive character the audience can identify with, since the police captain who destroys the criminal organization is a colorless bureaucratic official whose "victory lacks moral significance". If any in the film's audience was