M (1931)

Country: Germany

Genre(s): Crime / Drama

Director: Fritz Lang

Cast: Peter Lorre / Gustaf Grundgents / Otto Wernicke

Plot

A serial child killer is on the loose in Berlin, taunting the police through the press.  Repulsed by his crimes and frustrated by increased police presence on the streets, the local underworld determines to hunt down and punish the killer on their own terms.

What I Liked

We’ve all heard of certain artists being described as being ahead of their time.  Movie director Fritz Lang was at least a generation, if not two, ahead of his contemporaries in so many ways, the epitome of a visionary.  All of the films of his which I have thus far seen reflect his uncanny talent for predicting the future of filmmaking, but for the purposes of length I’ll stick to my main topic here, “M,” an unsettling thriller that paved the way for so much to follow.  This was the first time that I’d ever seen this film, yet there was so much that was familiar about it.  This is not because the film is derivative; quite the opposite.  So many later films cribbed so much of what made them great from this movie.  To keep things brief, I’ll point out a couple of examples.

Visually, Lang makes such emphatic and original use of shadow that darkness becomes something of a character all its own, and a fascinating character at that.  Shadows stretch guiltily behind creeping figures, they form bars and crosses across horrified faces, they loom over the streets of a terrorized city, they provide sanctuary for both the predatory and the frightened, and at times they frame entire scenes.  In this unprecedented use of shadow, particularly within the environment of an labyrinthine urban environment, Lang predates Carol Reed’s influential mystery thriller “The Third Man” by a full eighteen years, and the entire noir subgenre in America by roughly two decades.

Then there is the character of the killer, Hans Beckert, portrayed so powerfully in a career-making performance by that most magnificent of character actors, Peter Lorre.  Lang, co-scripter Thea von Harbou, and Lorre himself created a new kind of film monster in Beckert.  This monster is no vampire, beast, or walking dead.  It is a man, a man who would appear harmless, even friendly to the average passerby; yet a man who is a slave to his compulsion to commit reprehensible acts.  These type of characters are so prevalent in television, books, and film today that it is easy to forget how new this concept was to filmgoers of 1931.  Nearly 30 years later, when Alfred Hitchcock (a director who arguably took a lot of his signature style from this film) introduced American movie audiences to Norman Bates, the film “Psycho” caused an uproar over its unsettling depiction of a psychopath and his shocking crimes.  At a time that Hollywood was producing monsters in the form of “Frankenstein” and “Dracula,” Fritz Lang had already stumbled onto a monster far more vicious, one that the Hollywood studios wouldn’t dare expose for decades to come, the human mind.

I could go on about the films which owe a debt to “M,” either technically or thematically, from “Frankenstein” to “A Clockwork Orange.”  After all, I haven’t really touched on the film’s exploration of crime and punishment, the individual and society, or law versus justice, there just isn’t room.  Suffice it to say that “M” is far more complex than a description of its comparatively simple plot would convey.

What I Didn’t Like

The film does get off to something of a slow start.  Outside of the creepiness of watching the killer at his work, most of the early portion of the film is composed of an extended montage of the social fall-out from his crimes and the ineptitude of the local authorities in catching him.  Though necessary to explain how it is that the gangster elements in Berlin decide to go after the Beckert, these scenes are almost entirely devoid of any interesting dialogue, action, or characterization.  Thus the third or so of the film was a real let down from what I had expected based on the film’s reputation.  However, those who are patient will be amply rewarded for sticking around, as things get considerably more intense once the gangsters begin their pursuit.

Most Memorable Scene

For the first two thirds of the film, Peter Lorre speaks maybe a half dozen lines, if that.  He is sufficiently creepy in his scenes as Beckert, but in the film’s final act he is given opportunity to show off his acting talents.  Hauled before a kangaroo court composed of the denizens of Berlin’s underworld, Beckert frantically cycles through a series of emotions in a matter of just a few minutes.  Lorre delivers a terrific performance from out of the shadowy corner in which Beckert cowers, one that wound up leading to a long career as one of Hollywood’s most famous character actors.  The performance only helps the impact of the scene, where somehow Beckert, a child killer and (it is implied) child molester, somehow comes off as a bit sympathetic, if only slightly, as he faces the horror of a vigilante mob.  Here the film’s more complex themes, which have until this point only been implied, are explicitly brought to the forefront.  “M” winds up asking a lot of questions about the nature of crime, punishment, society, and the human psyche.  Most importantly, it leaves the answers to those questions up to the audience.

My Rating: 4 out of 5