M
 (1931)
(also available on Criterion DVD)
review by Big McLargehuge

We get Peter Lorre in his first, and what I think finest, role as the child killer stalking the streets and playgrounds of pre-WW2 Dusseldorf. He is almost a non-person. Invisible for most of the film as a man hidden beneath a long black overcoat and fedora leaving a trail of tiny bodies in his wake as the city grown more and more terrified and angry.

Add to this mix a police department that has no leads and a growing body count, an organized criminal underworld also suffering for the sins of Lorre’s activities, desperate mothers, panic in the streets, and a perpetually dark city seemingly crushed beneath the weight of its industrial infrastructure.

M is a whirlwind of a film.

We get three distinct points of view throughout, that of Inspector Lohmann a corpulent chain-smoking homicide detective, Shranker, a cunning gangster on the run from the law who rallies the underworld to find the child killer at all costs, and those of the grieving mothers who wait impatiently for their children to return home.

M also offers a detailed police procedural, a caper story, a horror movie, AND a courtroom drama (that challenges the audience’s views on capital punishment) all wrapped into two hours of subtitled German. This is more than virtually any modern film, or audience for that matter, could handle at one time, yet Lang pulls it off. He does it with flair too. The entire film looks like it’s covered in coal dust, much like coal powered Dusseldorf, as Lang takes us from claustrophobic police stations to even more claustrophobic hotel rooms, into the depths of the Dusseldorf underworld hangouts, and inside the mind of a homicidal maniac.

Okay, that last one isn’t visual, but it still fits. Lorre isn’t given much to do for 90% of this movie except walk around, occasionally pick up a little girl, take her for candy, balloons, oranges, and other presents, then destroy her. We never see the violence in this movie, in fact, we never see any violence. Lang is wise enough to know that the audience will eagerly fill in the horrors of child murder if he gives us enough inferences: a ball rolling out from behind a bush, or a child-shaped balloon caught in telegraph wires.

The film really picks up steam as all of Dusseldorf turns on itself. Neighbor accuses neighbor, stranger accuses stranger, and whole mobs descend on innocent men who even speak to strange children. The cops have to do something, even if, as they are well aware, it will come to nothing. Enter Inspector “Fatty” Lohmann, he’s been after the child killer for months and has nothing to show for it, he knows it too, and during rare occasions when he actually leaves the police station, he is heckled on the street.

Lohmann has a plan though. He thinks the child killer is hiding in the Dusseldorf underworld and stages several high-profile raids to smoke the killer out. This infuriates the common criminals of Dusseldorf, all those police means business is bad, so they do what they think the cops should have already done. They decide to find the child killer.

Lang knows suspense. When Lorre is prowling for victims we rarely see his form, instead Lang gives us Lorre’s frantically whistled “Hall of the Mountain King”, shots of empty playgrounds, shots of mothers putting out dinner and calling into the night unaware that their daughters are dead. Lang also gives us a race between the police and criminals. Who will capture Lorre first?

Shranker knows that everyone is suspicious and that only a few people can move throughout the city without raising suspicion. With the efficiency of a German car factory he puts the city’s beggars union to work scouring each street for the killer. Once identified, he and the safecrackers, gang leaders, bootleggers, and thieves all work together to take Lorre from the building where he’s become trapped.

I don’t want to give too much away, there is so much to see in M that any more description will be anticlimactic should you choose to view it.

The last lines of t he film are the most telling. A group of judges utter “in the name of the people” as Lang pans down to a bench of grieving mothers. One sobs “this won’t bring out babies back. Watch your children...”

Draw your own conclusions from that, but it’s a chilling turn that even the mothers would find pathos in a killer of children. Find this film, buy it, show it to friends, then watch Seven, or Silence of the Lambs, or some other Hollywood crime blockbuster, and see just how much Lang got right way back in 1931.