[1] The Great Gambler: A Picture of the Time (Der große Spieler: Ein Bild der Zeit) Dr. Mabuse is a criminal mastermind, doctor of psychology, and master of disguise, armed with the powers of hypnosis and mind control, who oversees the counterfeiting and gambling rackets of the Berlin underworld.

He visits gambling dens by night under various guises and aliases, using the power of suggestion to win at cards and finance his plans.

Among his many henchmen are: Spoerri, his cocaine-addicted manservant; Georg, his chauffeur and sometime assassin; Pesch, an inept goon; Hawasch, who employs a gang of blind men in a counterfeiting operation; Fine, a woman who serves as a lookout and Folies Bergère dancer Cara Carozza, who loves him.

Mabuse orchestrates the theft of a commercial contract to create a temporary panic in the stock market, which he exploits to make huge profits.

State prosecutor Norbert von Wenk takes an interest in Hull, believing he is the latest in a string of victims similarly tricked by the elusive "Great Unknown".

Boarding a taxicab driven by Georg, Wenk is gassed, robbed, and set adrift in a rowing boat.

Wenk enlists the aid of Countess Told (nicknamed the "Passive Lady"), an aristocrat bored by her dull husband and a thrill seeker, to try to get the information by trickery.

Once there, Mabuse, taken by the Countess's beauty, decides to display his power by telepathically inducing her husband, Count Told, to cheat at poker.

Inferno: A Game for the People of our Age (Inferno: Ein Spiel von Menschen unserer Zeit) A sick and disgraced Count Told seeks the help of Dr. Mabuse to treat his depression; Mabuse uses this chance to isolate the Count in his manor and cut off any inquiries about the Countess's whereabouts.

Dr. Mabuse speculates that the Count had fallen under the control of a hostile will and asks Wenk if he is familiar with the experiments of one "Sandor Weltmann", who will be performing a public demonstration of telepathy and mass hypnosis at a local theater.

Dr. Mabuse flees through an underground sewer to Hawasch's counterfeiting workshop, where he becomes trapped, as the doors cannot be opened from the inside.

[3] The film also eliminated a subplot in which Mabuse's actions are shown to be motivated by a desire to create his own country within South America.

[3] But Kalat also notes that this eliminates the irony of the fact that Mabuse was seen by many viewers as a representation of aspects of Adolf Hitler, and many Nazis actually fled to South America after World War II.

[2] Lang scholar Paul Jensen interpreted Mabuse as "a symbol to unite all the negative factors in Germany at the time".

[3] The film depicts difficult problems such as rampant crime, worthless money and a volatile stock market as thus being under the control of a single man.

[1][3][5] Bernd Widdig points out that while Dr. Mabuse is not an anti-Semitic film, aspects of Mabuse's character may have reflected contemporary stereotypes of Jews, especially since he acts in stereotypically Jewish roles such as psychoanalyst, banker, peddler and revolutionary, and consistent with the views on Jews of some contemporary Germans his manipulations were responsible for problems in society.

[2] A contemporary Nazi critic wrote that Mabuse is "a quintessential Jewish figure" who goes through time with the singular goal of "mastery of the world" regardless of the consequences to others and whose descent into insanity caused his crimes to go unpunished in what the Nazi critic described as "the typical case of the Jewish criminal".

[6] Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung called the first part "the attempt to create an image of our chaotic times" in its 30 April 1922 issue.

[8] Time Out criticized the film for its "disorganised and erratically paced" narrative and "shaky" grasp of social reality but praised its "flashes of inspiration".

[9] Entertainment Weekly reviewer Tim Purtell rated the film an A−, comparing the titular villain to those in the James Bond and Mission Impossible movies.