Photo: Criterion
I’ve long been a fan of the German auteur Fritz Lang. My film review blog and newsletter is named after a quote from Lang that was featured in Godard’s Le Mépris (Contempt): “Cinemascope wasn’t meant for men. It’s for snakes and funerals.” I even named my podcast after Lang’s 1952 Western Rancho Notorious (starring Marlene Dietrich).
But Lang’s reputation has dipped over time, while the likes of Hitchcock and Kubrick have grown. To a degree, this is fair enough as his later work as a Hollywood director-for-hire hasn’t entirely stood the test of time and he was a chilly personality, making little effort at burnishing his historical legacy.
But the successes are extraordinary and film history would be very different without him. His science-fiction epic Metropolis revolutionised cinema and created many of the standard tropes of what we consider sci-fi movies today. His expressionist epic adaptation of Die Nibelungen in 1924 helped define early cinema’s visual language and he helped create film noir with You Only Live Once (1937).
Photo: Criterion
And then there is M (1931), the almost Google-resistant masterpiece of a psychological thriller that combined cutting social satire with an early police procedural, and has become one of the most influential films of all time (and equal 36th in the Sight & Sound poll of the best films of all time). It was Lang’s first sound film, and he effortlessly conquered that medium as he had conquered the silent world before that.
A serial child murderer is terrorising Berlin. The police are helpless – despite the new-fangled science of fingerprinting – and the public are beside themselves with fear. Even the criminal fraternity want the culprit off the streets because the increase in law enforcement activity is getting in the way of their normal business. They enlist the help of the street community – beggars and homeless – to keep an eye out for clues and it ends up that a blind balloon salesman provides the necessary tipoff.
A manhunt ensues with the local crooks pursuing the killer into an office building after closing time. There’s a very funny sequence where they have to drill through doors and ceilings to try and find his hiding place before the alarm is raised and the cops arrive. (There’s also an amusing scene where the hapless cops shake down the occupants of a late-night dive bar which presumably would have been a familiar scene to the German audiences of the time.)
Photo: Criterion
Eventually, the criminals capture the predator and put him on ‘trial’, to the extent of assigning him some ‘legal’ counsel. The film then flips and becomes a moral debate about free will versus insanity, as the captive man argues to be handed over to the police to receive justice (and ‘just’ treatment) while the assembled pack of crims bay for summary capital punishment. A surprisingly modern and subtle argument to close a film that dares to humanise a monster.
The child murderer, Beckert, is played by Peter Lorre, one of the most distinctive actors of the 20th century. He had been known for comedy before M but became typecast and ended up playing yet more pathetic villains, notably in the Bogart classics The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. Between Lorre’s scenery-chewing and Lang’s expressionistic compositions, Beckert is somehow given more depth than many modern villains, to the extent that the audience becomes uncomfortably complicit in the mob justice he is threatened with, but M also ends by focusing on the victims so he doesn’t entirely get to steal the film.
Photo: Criterion
To give you an idea of how quickly Lang understood the narrative potential of sound, one of the reasons he cast Lorre was an Austrian accent that would instantly mark him as an outsider in 1931 Berlin.
M was Lang’s favourite of his own films and, if you are prepared to try a black and white German movie from 1931, you might find it becomes one of yours, too.
M is available as a digital rental from AroVision or on disc from Aro Street Video, Alice in Videoland or many public libraries. If your public library has a Kanopy plan, you may also find it there.
M is only currently available for streaming via an app called Classix and only for those that have paid the one-time fee for Classix+. Classix doesn’t stream via the web – you must have an Apple device (AppleTV, iPad, iPhone) but the app can stream to a compatible Chromecast doofer connected to your TV. I’ll take a closer look at Classix at a later date.
Dan Slevin is spending 2023 and 2024 watching each of the Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time (according to the BFI/Sight & Sound magazine).
