The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933) The last film Fritz Lang made before he fled Nazi Germany in 1934 was The Testament of Dr Mabuse. In later life, Lang would claim that he only made this sequel to his great silent hit Dr Mabuse: the Gambler (1922) so that he could fashion an anti-Nazi tract. If so, he succeeded. Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, it was banned as an incitement to public disorder. Lang's account was that Josef Goebbels broke this news at a meeting at which the propaganda minister simultaneously offered him a job as a studio head, so impressed was he with the director's abilities. That was the moment, Lang claimed, that he decided to move first to Paris and then to the States. There are reasons to dispute this account as self-constructed mythology, but it's not hard to see why the Nazis deemed the film inflammatory, given its depictions of a society riven with darkness and threatened constantly by terrifying explosions, which come about because of the far-reaching influence of a despotic mastermind. This was Lang's second sound movie after M (1931), and partly stands as a sequel to that, too, because of the recurring character of Lohmann (Otto Wernicke), a harassed police chief. He must deal with a spiderweb of intrigue, baffling clues and supernaturally charged evil, all emanating from a wizened, Moriarty-like supervillain, Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), who never leaves his asylum cell and utters not a word in corporeal form. Rendered insane by the events of the earlier film, as well as being a mute relic of the silent age, he is no less powerful: the master plan, or "last will," he's compiling threatens the very fabric of society, and all who come into contact with it, especially the psychiatrist Dr Baum (Oscar Beregi), are brought under his mesmerising sway. Lang attended one of Hitler's rallies in 1932 and witnessed the mass hypnosis of the Führer's followers first-hand. It's fascinating that the script - largely Lang's own work, unlike previous collaborations with his then wife, Thea von Harbou, who became a Nazi sympathiser - would describe Mabuse as an Übermensch, and have him scribbling these Mein Kampf-like ravings from his prison cell. Not even death spoils his day. He appears as a kind of livid phantom, his brain exposed, and invites Baum into his "endless empire of crime." The tribal masks and skulls lining the doctor's office walls give the scene a grisly flair. The use of sound is strikingly brilliant. The movie opens in medias res with a disgraced cop (Karl Meixner) in the thick of a counterfeiting operation, with the hideous, grinding clamour of machinery instilling an infernal dread. Mabuse's orders are transmitted from behind a Wizard of Oz-like curtain in the criminals" HQ, but it's a trick: when the romantic leads pull it back, they find a cardboard cut-out and a gramophone. Lang was already telling us not to accept sound at face value, but as part of cinema's arsenal of illusions. The pair become locked in the same room, and the recording tells them they will die in three hours: now all we hear is the ticking of a time bomb. There's no escaping the helter-skelter horrors of this movie - its chaotic world is one of persecution, dogma and corruption all around. When a chemical factory abruptly starts blowing up near the climax, we surrender to this mad apocalypse as a kind of prophetic nightmare. The Testament of Dr Mabuse is available on DVD and Blu-ray from Masters of Cinema