MUBI

Director, Fritz Lang was a highly innovative genius for the early German cinema. Ranging from expressionist art films to American film-noirs, Lang has become an inspirational guide for filmmakers, one of the great artists in the 20th century. During the German Expressionist movement, Lang had made a number of pictures, including his science-fiction masterpiece, Metropolis (1927). Metropolis is considered to be his finest piece to debut on the silver screen, a dystopian future under the regime of capitalism towering over with machines, juxtaposed by the Biblical allusion of The Tower of Babel. His craft is without question, creating new techniques with editing and special effects. Some of the films that he made later in Germany, reflected the social crisis of fear of the public.

M from my point of view remains an essential to Lang’s craft of film. It was his first sound feature, and the first film to make actor, Peter Lorrie an icon. It opens with a high angle shot of a group of children singing about a child murderer roaming the streets in Berlin. This soon foreshadows as we soon follow a little girl walking along playfully, when a certain figure (off-screen, but his shadow is silhouetted against the wall) looms over her. M is a psychological thriller at its peak. Peter Lorrie as the pedophiliac killer, Hans Becker was very uncanny for me in a profound sense. His performance was gripping, heart pounding, a nihilistic emotion of rage about to burst at any given moment. His acting was stunning, though his screen-time was limited and only giving one monologue.

The majority of film basically is devoted for the police and criminal underground in search of the child killer. But these are strong, potential performances. Otto Wernicke is brilliant as Inspector Lohmann. Some of the characters give off a cruel gesture, nearly repugnant in usage of their expression. Ironically, Peter Lorrie appears as though he was innocent. It is as though German society has no moral conscience; perhaps this is a reflection, a satire of the rise of Nazism. A motif that Lang uses within the film is Becker peering through his reflection, such as the scene with the shop-glass window displaying a stylized inventory of knives and sharp utensils. A very potent way of expressing, an illustration of someone rather uncommon, but beneath his outer shell there is something rather sadistic. Becker gleefully gives little girls treats and his friendship before he kills them.

Lang’s use of light and shadow is so stunning. He gives his own impression of Berlin as a dark and haunting place of no virtue. Basically, using low-key lighting techniques that receive a foreboding mood to the plot. There is almost an illuminated loathing when viewing the Germany society. It plays as a social commentary. Lang’s usage of the camera becomes the leading eye of suspense. His angles and shots produce an effect that reveals the characters’ mannerisms. A pivoted sequence is when Lorrie has been discovered being the child murderer as a civilian places a powdered shaped “M” on his waistcoat, in the next scene Lorrie looks over his shoulder through a mirror and begins to threat. I look this iconic image as a revealing his true colors begin to unfold, he witnesses himself. The “M” would be the symbol for murder. This is truly become a favorite.

I may be barking up the wrong tree completely here but, having just watched M again for the first time in ages, I was struck by how the film seems to prefigure the work of Jean-Pierre Melville in certain key respects. Firstly, as played by Otto Wernicke and Gustaf Gründgens respectively, Fritz Lang presents us with a police inspector and a gangster who are equally charismatic, thereby testing the audience’s sympathy, a trick which Melville would make good use of, time and again, in his Nouvelle Vague noirs of the late Fifties and Sixties. But rather than being a straightforward personality contest between the good guys and the bad guys, Lang’s far more disturbing moral dilemma invites us to choose between the criminal justice system and mob rule in the question of what should be done with Peter Lorre’s pathetic child murderer, who is beyond the pale of the regular criminal fraternity. The director would, of course, return to the subject of mob justice for his first American movie, Fury, in 1936. Lang’s fascination with meticulous police procedure in M is also very similar to Melville’s in Le Samouraï, and I was yet again reminded of Melville in those scenes where the criminal mob uses the tools and techniques of its trades to close in on the cornered Lorre in a deserted office building, which is essentially a heist scenario with Lorre as the booty.

I first saw Fritz Lang’s masterpiece M in a college class on mass culture, and it made for the ideal context to see this powerful film. The basic idea behind “mass culture”—at least, what those who criticized it feared—is that it would tell people what to think. It would erase individuality into a simplified worldview, with heroes, villains, and the satisfying victory of the former over the latter. To see this in action, you need only to look at the contemporaneous Nazi propaganda clips, included as a special feature on the Criterion DVD.

M, though, is the opposite: it provokes a reaction, but does not prescribe one. In this sense, M can be seen as an offshoot of the dramatic theories being practiced at the time by the modernist playwright Bertolt Brecht, who sought to create an “epic theater” that kept emotions at a distance and refused to allow the audience to become complacent. M does this, draining the more Romantic pleasures out of the thriller genre by creating a world in which heroes and villains do not exist. The line between them is blurred, and by the end, the labels are meaningless.

The plot of this particularly chilling tale: an anonymous German city in the 1930s is rocked by a series of grisly murders. A serial killer is targeting children. The public is frightened, and the police step into action, overturning the city in search of the culprit. The criminal underworld, which only wants to gamble and racketeer in peace, is thrown into turmoil by the increased raids—and so they decide to launch a search of their own. With both the police and the criminals hunting for the culprit, the arc of the film is that of a slowly tightening net. At the center is the mysterious killer (a haunting Peter Lorre), who wanders the streets alone, whistling Peer Gynt as he hunts for his next victim.

But the film is not so straightforward. First and foremost, the film disorients the viewer with a notable lack of a grounded, sympathetic moral center—which is the staple of pretty much all mainstream entertainment. Just who, exactly, is the main character in M? The first answer is that there is none. Action is largely divided throughout the city, focusing only on mass identities: the cops, the criminal underground, the frightened public. The second is that, if there is a main character, it’s the killer himself. He’s the only one who isn’t part of a mass identity—and he’s a madman, whose crimes are so heinous and senseless that they instantly register as unforgivable.

M has been credited as a primary touchstone for the genre of police procedurals, but it’s interesting to think about how it differs from its offspring. Consider the scene where the police develop their plan to catch the killer. A madman like him, they surmise, must have a history, so they’ll search through the records of anyone who was recently let out of a mental asylum. It’s easy to imagine this scene appearing in CSI or Silence of the Lambs and coming across as heroic. The law is on his trail. But the way Lang plays it is darker, more alienating, full of atmosphere and shadows. It’s not a scene of heroes leaping into action; it’s a scene of a machine correcting an error.

As the net tightens around Lorre, we sit on the edge of our seat, hoping that he won’t get away. But once he’s caught, what then? The second half of M is remarkable in the way it plays with our expectations. In the final scene—which is what brings M together and raises it to the top of the pantheon—Lorre is caught by the criminal underground and given a kind of “kangaroo court” mock trial. As the mob readies itself to kill him, he breaks down and starts screaming that he’s insane, that he can’t help himself. He looks both wild and strangely innocent. The character—and the film—wouldn’t work if not for Lorre, and the way he looks like a frightened child. It’s a brilliant performance, and Lorre’s speech allows us, at least, to pity him. Not empathize, sympathize, or forgive, but pity. In other words, the film sets up a villain and refuses to allow us to be comfortable with his demise.

M was made in Germany around 1931, during the ascendancy of the Nazi Party. The behind-the-scenes stories about it are legendary: that the Nazis made Lang change the original title, Murderers Among Us, for being politically inflammatory; and that Lang was offered the job as the official filmmaker of the Third Reich, but fled the country instead. These stories are largely exaggerated, but it’s easy to see the mood of M as a reflection of the time—a social critique disguised as a thriller. Even with Lorre gone, one can’t feel optimistic about the society in this film: it’s too stark and corrupt, with warmth and sunlight too hard to find. We’ve already seen how easy it is for this city to turn on itself, and for its citizens to become a mob. What we’re left with, when all is said and done, is just a black screen, with a woman’s voice urging us to keep close watch over the children.

M is a staple of film history, but it holds up remarkably well in any context. It’s worth taking a moment at the end to note the film’s use of sound, which is one of its most famous elements. After all, “talkies” were less than 5 years old, and already Lang had figured out the new medium: when to use sound with no image, when to use image with no sound, and how to play the two against one another. This, coupled with Lang’s gift for filming a scene, makes the film feel more modern and vital than anything else that’s 80 years old. It earns its reputation as one of the great films of all time, and its essential for anyone halfway interested in cinema.

10 out of 10

“I can’t help myself! I haven’t any control over this evil thing that’s inside of me! The fire, the voices, the torment!”…Who knows what it’s like to be me?’’

‘M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder.’ M. M. I was compelled by this film. Excellent, relevant, timely, a spectacle, Peter Lorre, expressionism, film noir… Sound films were just starting, but this film by Fritz Lang was beyond expectations. He used artistic camera works, and mirrors played an important part in depicting character expressions. Few dialogues, lack of background music, long silent moments, and well-remembered expressions from Lorre were some of what makes it one of the finest ever made. Long before most people were aware of crime solving technology, Lang already showed sophisticated ways of solving crimes like fingerprint and handwriting analysis; thus, making ‘M’ one of the first psychological thrillers created.

I first became interested with its title; the single letter M. My guess was right when I thought it’s about a crime, but it was more than that. ‘M’ is about flaws of justice and those who gives it. Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert is a child murderer (kinder morder), and the typical reaction to this character is hatred and contempt. He is crippling the flow of life in the city that even criminals are threatened. Thus, lawbreakers teamed up to catch and silence him, so they could go back to their usual underground activities. Law enforcers were also in the pursuit, and the two parties go for the hunt before either of them catch the killer first. Hans, on the other hand, knows nothing about it. He’s preoccupied with luring another victim while whistling his signature murder tune: Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain.”

When he is finally caught, a fake trial is conducted by the criminals. Here, Beckert delivered a convincing, fiery monologue about how the voices in his head forced him to do the crimes and cited how criminals like those who pursued him have a choice to do such things or not unlike him. The sympathy slightly shifts. A bit of pity or even empathy for Beckert is brought out of viewers like me.

This is a gripping digging into the mind of a killer. It is a fascination to understand people like Hans Beckert that led me to like this film. Indeed, it is troubling to discover what the human mind is capable of. I always have it when watching ‘Criminal Minds.’ ‘M’ would be one of those films which exposed and still exposes.

Peter Lorre is only on screen in this Fritz Lang early sound masterpiece for less than 30 minutes, but his performance, as a tormented child murderer who is hunted and tried by a gang of underworld criminals, is so riveting and complex that he all but steals the show. But that is impossible with Lang and cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner working full steam to create a visual equivalent to the social jail Lorre feels closing in around him, with high angles, mirrors, reflections, and virtual bars (wood slags, hedges, curtains) suggesting this man’s imminent physical and moral collapse. Not only does Lang create a fluid mise-en-scene that, possibly for the first time, feels unbound by cumbersome audio equipment, but one that brilliantly utilizes sound for all its effect, capturing the murderer’s haunting whistle as the ultimate red herring in his ultimate downfall. This is one of a handful of early 30’s sound films that belongs on any list of the greatest films of all time, and Criterion’s recent Blu-ray pays it tribute with a glorious roster of extras, including an old interview with the master himself, a commentary track, a rare inclusion of the simultaneously made English language version, and a short film by Claude Chabrol.

(Friday / March 5, 2010 / 11:30 pm)

A disorderly crowd of people and a proud law enforcement officers are to capture a maniacal murderer, who causes the society to panic and worry about the dangers that can happen to their families, but it would not be easy for those searchers to do so. Desperate for their lives, beggars and the law enforcement collide to find the murderer. Fritz Lang’s back and forth camera shots are superbly fantastic. Lang created one of the creepiest psychos ever put on film. One scene, I felt an urge to help out find the killer, but soon I sympathized Peter Lorre’s character. A trapped man who cannot stop his own feelings, but can only run away through a boundless nowhere. Lorre’s insanely acting is scarier than his character’s image. “M” is a suspenseful beauty of a film that shows a chilling tormented evil inside a man’s mind and consciousness.

CSUN Cinematheque Viewing September 17

I had not seen M for at least three years. I saw the film at a time when I could count every foreign film I had watched at that point on one hand. So when I saw the film last night it was like watching it for the first time.

Like re discovering an old favorite I noticed plenty of things that had escaped me the first viewing. I remembered the main story, the manhunt lead by the criminals, the scene when the letter " M" is placed on the child murder’s shoulder, the first kill and a couple of other things. But what had escaped me was the incredible technique,the cinematography, the look and feeling of the film. The performances and the cast (the leader of the criminals is quite exceptional) seems to fit the world of the film.

The editing style really took me by surprise. It reminds me of what Nicolas Roeg would end up doing 40 years later. But unlike Roeg, who used his cutting technique to cut to the future scenes and past all at one scene (Don’t Look Now as an example) Lang cris crosses from conversation to conversation, from action to action that’s all taking place at several places while still remaining on topic of a particular scene in order to further the plot. The use of voice over to explain several police procedures while cutting to the very examples that are mentioned; all done very gracefully.

I’m not going to get into to much more sense this really is one of the more popular “foreign” films that one usually watches when first interested in cinema. So I’m really not saying anything new if I describe the plot or the psychology shit. But I have a feeling it may become under appreciated by the more “experienced” film buffs…

Lang’s first talkie, M is a masterpiece on all counts. It was the first major film to feature a leitmotif, and its use of sound was particularly revolutionary and innovative for its time. It is also a precursor to film noir, as it is one of the pinnacles of the German expressionistic films. Although it is not as surreal in its expressionist stylings as other German films of the day, its use of light and stylised sets is absolutely brilliant. The story concerns a child murderer, played by Peter Lorre in one of the great film performances. The man is hunted by police and the underworld alike, all while he attempts to hunt his own defenseless prey. Creepy, haunting and somehow tragic, M is one of the great treasures of film.

Can a film that was made in 1931 be seen in 2008 and feel not only relevant, but also like it could have been made yesterday? I’m not sure if I would have really believed it until finally watching Fritz Lang’s masterpiece M. One could say that cinema has been copying it throughout the decades, helping to give an illusion of innovation and contemporary feel, and that would not be wrong. With impeccable cinematography—save one very odd and disturbing shot of Inspector Lohmann—fantastic editing and montage work, a mesmerizing performance from Peter Lorre, and a careful use of sound, there is very little to fault. Not only technically sound, the underlying politics of the events at hand, the question of whether a justice system is flawed when murderers can be let go due to insanity, really intrigue. It’s not just about a manhunt for a child killer, it is a race between the law and the criminal underworld to find him and carry out whichever brand of punishment gets enforced first.

A true auteur, Lang creates one of the most memorable opening sequences I’ve ever seen. A perfect set-up to the events that have been occurring while also introducing the monster lurking behind the scenes with his welcoming whistle; it is orchestrated to perfection. Subtly giving the audience the details, Lang makes us a part of this world, invested in the manhunt, trying to figure out a way for him to be captured, instilling a bloodlust in us, making the final verdict a tough decision to swallow—does he deserve a fair trial or should the kangaroo court do their thing? The little girls play jump rope while singing a song about the “man in black” despite the chiding of one’s mother for them to stop. These killings have become a part of their lives, young and old, leaving an indelible mark on the community. And then comes the whistling, so cheerful and warm, what child could resist this man’s offering of candy and balloons? All we see at first is a silhouette covering over his wanted poster on a street post, adding to the mystery and fear, despite what appears to be just a nice man on a stroll. There is truly nothing more heartbreaking then watching young Elsie’s mother go room to room of her apartment, calling her daughter’s name after she is late from school. Lang’s static shots of the emptiness: the bare dinner plate, the unpopulated clothing room, and the sterile geometry of the stairwell with a hope that she may soon ascend become tough to stomach. And it all ends with a close-up shot outdoors—focusing on nothing—a bush in frame to the right. Soon, though, Elsie’s ball slowly rolls from the foliage into frame, a haunting image standing in for the tragedy we all know just occurred.

It’s not all artistry and craft setting the tone, but also wonderful storytelling. While the public is in an uproar for the safety of their streets, paranoid and lashing out on any unsuspecting man who appears to be talking to a child, the crime world becomes concerned because they are losing business and money. With raids on bars and seedy joints, identification papers are asked for and the police seem to be doing their jobs, if not actually looking for the killer. As they say, though, this man is probably a kind, gentle creature, someone you know as a friend, who just snaps when the time is right. It won’t be an easy case, because the man they are seeking only exists when he is doing the deed. Thus, the criminals begin their own hunt, to find the cause of their troubles, while also ridding the world of a killer, a man that the state doesn’t have the right to deem “reformed” only to let back out to kill again. The question becomes whether a man who isn’t held responsible for his actions can truly be given the blame. You need to come to grips with your own moral compass on that topic, because while you want him dead, you also feel sympathetic for his lack of control on his urges. Can the blame really be placed on the community—the parents who weren’t diligent enough to watch their own children while they were snatched from them? Maybe there isn’t anyone at absolute fault. Once you bring psychology into the equation, the problem only gets more confusing and tough to decipher, blurring that line between black and white, until the demarcation disappears completely.

It’s a credit to Lorre’s skill as an actor for allowing the audience to feel some remorse for him, despite the atrocities he has been committing. This is a time in cinema where sound was still being learned and its use in film becoming honed through trial and error. As a result, Lorre is a mix of silent film styling with sound added in. His expressions are big, but it all works along with his troubled soul, cowering in the face of a mob wanting blood, unable to remember the crimes he committed. He is a lost soul that needs help, but also needs to be stopped. With such an expressive face, Lang enhances his performance by only bringing sound in when necessary. He is unafraid to have moments of complete silence, marked by strong scratches and tapping of the killer, focusing all our attention exactly where it needs to be. There are no wham-bam explosions or loud music distracting us from the visuals, hoping we don’t look too closely at the story. No, M is the epitome of how a script can be directed in a way that allows the audience to follow along and understand each step of the way. Lang has a story to tell of corruption, violence, love, and loss. He tells it in a way that leads the viewers along a specific path, yet still keeps ambiguity as far as our feelings on what is happening. The groundwork is laid, but it is up to us to decide where we fall on the subject of responsibility. If a mother who fails to look at her child for one moment can be blamed for the child’s disappearance, then doesn’t the man who took her deserve it too, whether he was in his right mind or not? A fair trial is one thing, but retribution is another. It’s a slippery slope that crops up in court decisions even today and yet it was handled deftly way back in 1931 Germany, even getting by the Berlin censor board … showing that the topic won’t be solved anytime soon.

One could extol M’s virtues along many lines – sophistication of cinematic technique, its pivotal position as an original formative touchstone within the crime genre, the unique historical moment it captured (just before the Nazis came to power), the position it holds in director Fritz Lang’s brilliant career, his creative use of sound (and silence) in several key scenes, the brilliance of Peter Lorre’s performance as the child-killer and more. What stands out to me is the acuity of psychological insight that permeates the film from beginning to end. For a film made nearly 80 years ago, there’s very little other than the actual time period it was shot that seems dated, quaint or uninformed. What makes M even more impressive and remarkable is that such a subtle analysis was radically new and unprecedented for the films and popular culture of its time.

http://criterionreflections.blogspot.com/2009/02/m-1931-30.html