M
Peter Lorre is a twisted killer in this sometimes-dazzling, sometimes-dull Fritz Lang film.
M (1931). Grade: B-
Berlin, worldwide Depression. For some time, a disturbing number of children have gone “missing,” later found dead. It’s suspected by the authorities that there’s one twisted murderer behind this, but they don’t have anything in the way of leads.
Meanwhile, having a larger police presence on the lookout is making things tougher for pickpockets and “ladies of the evening” and other nonviolent criminals. So, the criminals wanna get the child murderer, too.
This was the first sound film, and second-to-last German film, by celebrated visual stylist Fritz Lang, an Austrian making movies in Germany. His 1927 Metropolis, about futuristic labor strife, was so ahead of its time in its sci-fi design that it hugely impressed Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. According to Lang, Goebbels eventually asked him to be the official propaganda filmmaker for the Nazis. So Lang said “thanks, sure!” and got the heck out of Germany.
This… may not be exactly true. Lang DID loathe the Nazis; he DID leave Germany; he eventually became a US citizen and was buried in Hollywood. But, in Lang’s version, he fled Germany right after meeting Goebbels, without even emptying his bank account; his passport actually showed that he was in-and-out of the country for four months before finally exiting for good. It’s a better story if he fled immediately, though, so I don’t blame Lang for telling it that way.
Another little white lie is the inspiration for this plot. Lang and his wife, the writer Thea von Harbou, were basically doing a ripped-from-the-headlines take on Peter Kürten, the “Vampire of Dusseldorf,” a serial killer whose victims were sometimes children. Lang later said the story wasn’t based on Kürten. Sure. That’s why, you see, the killer here writes taunting letters to the police/newspapers in red pencil. Kürten used BLUE pencil.1 So, obviously no connection at all!
That pencil. The police in M set out looking for everyone released from a mental institution, and searching their residences for red pencils. Seems like pretty circumstantial evidence to me.2 In fact, a lot of the police hemming and hawing here is really, quite tiresome. I realize you’ve got to have it to show how frustrated law enforcement are at their lack of leads, but there’s a bit too much of this, and it’s paced too poorly.
Lang was no stranger to overpadding. Metropolis was, originally, 153 minutes long. Die Nibelungen was 288! (Split into two parts, at least.) The best things here are when the camera is moving, or we’re following characters in motion, or a large group all talking over each other; there’s far too many scenes of people seated at desks or tables, being grumpy. (And smoking a WHOLE lot.)
There’s great visual stuff mixed in, though. Peter Lorre’s arrival as the killer is fantastic; just his profile shadow appearing over a poster announcing the public danger. (That whole opening scene is outstanding). There’s a shot later on which goes through a window into a room full of people that I watched several times, and I still can’t figure out how it was done. (I could listen to the commentary, but nah, not gonna do that.)
And there’s a really terrific, tightly-paced setpiece, where Lorre’s hiding inside an office building and the underworld figures are trying to track him down. The closest thing this movie has to making us understand Lorre’s killer is this sequence. You can imagine how frightened you’d be if people who wanted to get you were hunting for your hiding spot in a strange building. There’s a later big speech where Lorre explains his compulsions, and it’s not as effective as this “hide in the building” scene. It’s terrific how the different offices are all full of different things we don’t always understand, too. (Set design by an uncredited Edgar G. Ulmer. Credits left a lot of stuff out back then.)
That later big speech, where Lorre’s pleading for mercy to his sentencers…. it’s good. It’s effective. It’s also kinda hammy. Which is funny, because I recently rewatched The Maltese Falcon with a bunch of nice blogging movie nerds. And Lorre almost steals the movie. He’s very funny when he’s slyly mumbling, and he’s funny when he’s in full-meltdown, screaming mode, too. It’s a much more skilled film performance than this one — and this one isn’t bad.
What this one is, is a kind of transition. A commenter on that Falcon blog mentioned that M was “good, but you can also kind of tell they were still figuring out how to do films with sound.” And that goes for the acting, too. Silent film acting just WAS over-the-top, that’s how it was done. That doesn’t mean it was bad acting, merely acting in a different style. A style that became quickly outdated once we could hear actors speaking. Lorre here, especially in that last scene, is overplaying in that silent style. I don’t mind it at all! But he’d be better as he became more experienced with sound film.
One thing I really give Lang and cowriter von Harbou credit for is that they never show us a murder. (We see the child’s rather creepy balloon caught in electrical wires, instead… that shot works perfectly on its own.) When your movie is based on real events, or something quite close to them, depicting a terrifying crime has some really moral iffiness to it.
For example, take David Fincher’s Zodiac. The murders in that movie are quite terrifying. (Much more so than the murders in other Fincher “serial killer” movies, which by-and-large had no reason to ever be made, except money.) After I saw Zodiac late at night, and heard a strange noise in the apartment hallway, I grabbed a knife and turned off all the lights and crouched by the door. (So I could stab the killer in the ankle? I dunno what I was thinking. No killer appeared.)
But, when Fincher made Zodiac, some people who knew and cared about those victims were still (and are still) very much alive. There’s something really wrong about filming murder scenes that scarily — that lovingly, to be honest — when people might see it and be really, really hurt by the experience. (If they read that the movie is about the investigation. Which it is, and those are the best parts… but they’re not filmed as perfectly as those murder scenes.)
It could be that Lang was being conscientious when he didn’t depict a child’s murder… or it could be that he (with good reason) assumed that if he DID show it, audiences would storm out of the theater. That simply wasn’t something you showed at the time. It wasn’t banned, not yet, it just wasn’t done.
This movie is widely praised for being groundbreaking because of its dark material, its grim subject. And I suppose some of that praise is due. For this, and all the other films that helped movies grow up a little. I’m not going to be too impressed with that, since a lot of literature was already pretty grown up at the time. Yet it is an important step in movie history.
Actually, I was more impressed by the subject matter in one of Lang’s first Hollywood movies, Fury, starring Spencer Tracy. Tracy is driving through small-town nowheresville when he’s picked up for a crime he had nothing to do with. An outraged mob tries to kill him in his jail cell and he barely escapes. Now, since this was 1936, and the Hays Code was fully in effect, it had to be lily-white Spencer Tracy as the guy the mob was coming for. But smart audiences knew EXACTLY what the story was about. It was about lynching. (It’s not as inventive or visually stylish a movie as this is, not by a long shot. But it's more daring, in a way.)
That’s more impressive, to me, then doing one of cinema’s first serial-killer movies — a genre that, as a whole, has not been a great benefit to the world. In fact, such movies can contribute to an atmosphere which makes audiences think that only the harshest, most tyrannical regimes are necessary to stop such criminals. If Lang didn’t know that in 1931, he sure found out soon enough. One of the things the Nazis promised to do was crack down on the widespread gangs of the period, the “Ringvereine” (very similar to the criminals who are trying to find Lorre in this film). That’s what they promised. They weren’t successful at it.
From this in-depth review by Chicago film writer Michael G. McDunnah, which I absolutely salute for ignoring everything that Search Engine Optimization would say about ideal essay length. It’s only in the last few decades that people have decided anything above 2000 words is way too long — nobody in 1770, 1870, or 1970 would think so.
The actual Kürten was caught because one victim escaped and wrote a friend about the attack. The letter didn’t have correct postage, and a postal worker opened it. That worker went to the police, the police went to the victim, and she led them to where Kürten lived.