M (1931)

(50th - 8.3 - 7-Classic)

Fritz Lang's M is one of the films I've most looked forward to on this list. Quite apart from the high reputation of both the film and the director, it marked the first major role for one of my favourite actors, Peter Lorre. I've loved his offbeat style for years in acknowledged classics such as Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, late Roger Cormans like The Comedy of Terrors and The Raven, and lesser known gems like Mad Love. Lately I have also been discovering such neglected classics as The Verdict and Three Strangers, and Lorre is always distinctive and entertaining. Here he set the stage for all those offbeat roles by portraying a child murderer, who all of Berlin is trying to catch.

His first appearance in M is as a shadow against a poster offering 10,000 marks for his capture, while he picks up his next victim. We soon discover that he has already killed eight other children and young Elsie Beckman will make nine. The people of Berlin are terrified but can do little to help, outside of providing conflicting witnesses and mob hysteria. The police almost go without sleep as they expand their manhunt again and again but without success, though their constant raids net them a substantial number of other criminals. As the underworld continues to suffer from these raids, the criminal fraternity decides to remove the incentive for them by finding the murderer themselves before the police do.

What's most obvious to me is just how influential this 1931 German language film must have been on the entire subsequent history of cinema. Peter Lorre's character is abhorrent to everyone in the city and we see little of him during the first two thirds of the film, thus possibly creating the formula for any good monster movie. Rather than just having policeman run up and down aimlessly like Keystone Kops, we are given glimpses of crime scene work, almost seventy years before the CSI: Crime Scene Investigation franchise. The murderer also writes a letter to the newspapers which the police analyse in various departments, presaging the similar but even more tense sequence in Manhunter. Also while M starts like a silent film (or many a Woody Allen film) with simple unaccompanied titles and credits, it then proves that it has sound by giving it to us before we see any real visuals, in the form of children's voices singing a song about the murderer, a precursor to the '1, 2, Freddy's coming for you' of the A Nightmare on Elm Street series.

This use of sound stands out in M. This was Fritz Lang's first sound film, though he had already made such silent classics as Dr Mabuse the Gambler and Metropolis which is also in this list. Coming newly to sound, he chose to use it differently to most directors. There are similarities but also major differences to the Universal release of Frankenstein which was also released in 1931, for instance. Neither Fritz Lang or James Whale chose to use a backing score for their films, but Whale used what have become standard sound effects to make his action realistic. In comparison, there is very little of this in M, to the degree that some scenes are entirely silent, even when you'd expect to hear a lot of noise. Instead Lang uses sound either for dialogue or for specific effect. There is an incredible amount of whistling, for example, which has different purposes at different points of the film, but proves fundamental in the capture of the killer. At one point Lang even has the sound turn on and off depending on when a character clamps his hands over his ears.

There are also some highly innovative techniques here that had not been used before. I love the way Fritz Lang parallels discussions, such as when both the police and the underworld leaders, separately but with great similarity, debate how to catch the murderer. He alternates between the two discussions seamlessly making them seem as one. This is time honoured comic book technique, as used to incredible effect by Alan Moore in his masterpiece, Watchmen, but M came half a century before. To go a step further, at points Lang even has characters in different places continue the same sentence as a means of segueing from one scene to the next.

What is most impressive though is the role of Hans Beckert, both as created by Fritz Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou, who co-wrote the script, and as portrayed by Peter Lorre. Unusually for films of any age, it carries with it a sense of both horror and pity. Beckert, loosely based on a real serial killer from Dusseldorf called Peter Kuerten, is sick, in both common usages of the word. He preys upon young girls and seduces them with balloons and candy, marking him indelibly as a dangerous pervert. We are not told so specifically, but can only assume that he does far more to his victims than merely killing them. Yet Beckert was also a former inmate of a mental institute, released from care as supposedly cured.

Lang and von Harbou invented the character and crafted the framework through which he develops, but it's Peter Lorre who brings him to life. Obviously Beckert is still sick mentally, as we see his torment plainly on his face and through his actions. He is driven to these crimes yet is horrified himself by them, and while we want him caught and stopped, we also want him treated not lynched. Astoundingly, Lorre puts all this over to us mostly without the benefit of speech. He has a lot of screen time in the second half of the film, but very few lines, leaving him free to use body language and sound to help us understand both sides of his character.

One particular masterclass moment shows the change between them. Beckert is innocently windowshopping and eating an apple when he sees the reflection of a young girl in a mirror in the shopfront. His entire body language changes as he internally fights his demons, and when he looks up, he is not the man we previously saw. Now everything he does helps to build our insight of his tortured soul: his whistling (admittedly dubbed by Lang), the way he moves his hands or closes his eyes, the tone of his voice. It's truly one of the greatest acting performances I've ever seen, and yet he rarely speaks! When he does it's in German, which is to be expected in a German language film but of course I've only heard him speaking English elsewhere, as he emigrated soon after the film's release fearing persecution from the Nazis. He was still learning English three years later when he featured in Hitchcock's original version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, for which he learned his lines phonetically.

Lorre wasn't the only genius working on M. This entire attitude of inviting both horror and pity simultaneously marks M as being not just a masterpiece but a masterpiece well ahead of its time. I'm in awe of the talent of Fritz Lang to have made this film at all, but even more so that he made it in 1931. It isn't a film about a serial killer, it's more a film about what a serial killer means to society. We don't see a single murder and we see more evil in the actions of others than in Beckert's own despicable deeds. Most tellingly, there are chilling similarities to more recent events, especially for me the vigilante incidents that followed the publication in the English tabloid newspaper, News of the World, of the names and addresses of all known sex offenders in the country. People and houses were attacked before it was realised that many of the names and addresses were out of date. One woman was even targeted because of a stupid assumption that 'paediatrician' meant 'paedophile'.

Such reactions could have come straight out of the script of this film, especially the powerful final sequence. After being marked with an M for murderer by a beggar, in obvious reference to the A for adulterer carried by Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Beckert changes from predator to prey. He is followed, cornered like a rat and finally captured. He pours out his tortured soul in front of the kangaroo court that would try him, comprised of the criminal underworld and supposedly cast from real criminals. This confession scene is the powerhouse performance that made Lorre's career in films possible. After this he was in major demand and was working for Hitchcock in three years and Hollywood in four.

Bizarrely, as both Lang and Lorre were Jewish, this memorable scene was later used out of context by the Nazis to denigrate that religion in their notorious propaganda film, The Eternal Jew. This choice is especially ironic as Lang originally had trouble obtaining studio space to make his film under its working title The Murderers are Among Us. The story goes that the studio owner was a Nazi and believed that the title referred to the Nazi party itself, probably accurately.

I'd looked forward to watching M for years. Not only did it exceed my highest expectations but now I'm looking forward to watching it again. I can't say that for many films, even the classics I've been watching as part of this project. That property alone makes M something very special indeed.