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MGermany (1931): Crime/Drama/Horror
Not rated, Black & White, 111 minutes
M is unquestionably director Fritz Lang's most chilling and provocative film, if not his greatest production. This story of a child molester and murderer is an uncompromising and stark film, one also responsible for bringing Peter Lorre to international prominence.
The true (and grisly) facts of the Dusseldorf Child Killer
Scenes for study (require RealPlayer, available as a free download from www.real.com):
City terrorized. Berlin is in the grip of terror as an unknown child molester continues to kill little girls while the police frantically search with no clues to the murderer's identity. Frenzied citizens turn against each other and inform on their neighbors. Police raids turn up an army of criminals, from forgers to prostitutes, but none can be charged with the killings. Moreover, the underworld is incensed with the intense heat put upon it, and its leading members resolve to find the murderer themselves, ordering the criminal community to find the killer and bring him to an underworld tribunal where he will be tried and, if found guilty, executed.
Another victim. A mother prepares supper for her little girl who is playing in the street. The girl bounces a ball off a billboard to which is tacked a reward poster for the child killer and a shadow crosses her face. She looks up and follows the man who buys her a balloon as he whistles bars from Grieg's Peer Gynt ("Hall of the Mountain King"). The mother calls frantically for her child; then a ball is shown rolling out of some shrubbery, and the balloon sails upward to be caught on a telegraph wire.
Newspapers blare the latest killing while the killer (Lorre) writes a desperate letter to a newspaper, scrawling the words: "I haven't finished yet." The chief of detectives (Otto Wernicke) concludes after this latest killing that the murderer is mentally unbalanced, and the cop has his force sift through underworld suspects for the criminally insane. Other detectives are ordered to interview former mental patients, and a plainclothesman following leads goes to the dingy apartment of Lorre but finds him gone.
Tell-tale marking. Lorre is lurking on a streetcorner, watching a little girl. He begins to follow her, whistling the haunting bars from Peer Gynt, but he suddenly halts when the child's mother appears. Police searching Lorre's room find an Ariston cigarette wrapper, the same found at the sites of previous murders. Lorre is now following another child, buying a balloon for her and whistling the same tune, which this time is recognized by the blind balloon seller, who calls another beggar and tells him that Lorre is the killer.
The beggar chalks an M in the palm of his hand and, when passing Lorre, presses this tell-tale sign on his back. The little girl tries to wipe it off, and Lorre turns to see he has been marked with the sign of Cain, the M reflecting in a store window.
Judgement. Lorre flees in panic, taking refuge in a deserted office building, as word spreads through the criminal ranks that Lorre has been identified and where he is hiding. Disguised as policemen, gangsters rush into the building and drag Lorre from a storeroom where he has been cowering. He is taken to the cavernous basement of a warehouse where the criminals have set up a court.
The jury has no sympathy for Lorre as he pleads his case. Staring at him with agonized looks are the mothers of his victims. Lorre, his soft, round, porcine features distorted horribly, screams, whimpers, and whines as only Lorre could do, a trapped animal fighting for his life. The court-appointed lawyer tells the judges and jury, not too convincingly, that Lorre is a sick man and should be handed over, not to the executioner, but to the doctor. Lorre is nevertheless convicted and sentenced to death. Before he can be executed, however, the police burst into the underworld hideout and take Lorre away.
In the original 117-minute version (the one shown in H140), Lang next shows Lorre sentenced in a legitimate court, with three weeping women, mothers of victims, looking on.
A chilling masterpiece. M is truly a film of the sinister
soul but, enlightened for its day, insists that judgment be made by all, as Lang tells the
story of the killer from the killer's point of view as well as that of the outside world
searching for him. As with all his masterpieces, Lang also tells his grim tale in murky
shadow, the low-key lighting being a hallmark of German cinema. 
His characters here, especially Lorre, are creatures
of the night and, during the daytime hours, are shown as shadow figures.
Sound suspense. This was Lang's first sound film and he made the most of it, using sound to further emphasize the terror on the screen. The sound of Lorre's knife snapping open—not to stab a small boy standing nearby as the viewer might suspect but to peel an orange, for example; the rattling of an attic door by a guard; and then Lorre's heavy breathing in the dark to let the viewer know he is there, all heighten the film's suspense.
Distinctive images. No murder of a child is shown, but Lang achieves an equally chilling effect through brilliant opticals—distorted camera angles; weird, unnatural images and setups; even crude symbols at times. Lang also makes the most of the frenzy among the citizens, police and criminals alike, cross cutting into these wholly different worlds to produce the same effect, fear. He takes full advantage of the wide-ranging scope of his story by using the city of Berlin, its broad streets and narrow alleyways, its ancient ruins and run-down slums, where corruption seems to thrive on centuries of immorality coursing through the veins of Lorre and others of his ilk. Lang's distinctive images would influence many a filmmaker to come.
Lorre typecast. Lorre was a complete unknown when Lang saw him in a play, "Squaring the Circle," then running in Berlin. The Hungarian-born actor (christened Laszlo Lowenstein) continued to act in the play at night while shooting scenes during the day for M. He was so effective in the role of the heinous killer that he would be typecast for life and would go on playing repulsive, frightening little psychopaths for the rest of his days.
Nazi aggression. Although he later denied it, Lang based his character (he wrote the script with his wife, Thea von Harbou) on the worst mass killer in Germany at the time, Peter Kurten.
Nevertheless, the film's original title, Morder Unter Uns (Murderers Among Us) almost prevented Lang from making his classic crime film.
The Nazi Party initially thought that the title, Murderers Among Us, meant a film about the Nazis. The censors later gave Lang a hard time before allowing the release of the film, which quickly met with universal praise and shocked the world with its frank exposure of a human beast.
Lang rightly feared the Nazis. The Nazis later bowdlerized M; Nazi film producer Fritz Hippler made a phony documentary, "The Eternal Jew," in 1940, showing Lorre's confession at the end of M out of context as the absurd confession of a Jew who was incapable of controlling his perversions, and saying that he represented all Jews, who were unfit to live in a moral civilization.
During production, Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels also met with Lang and told him that years earlier he and Hitler had seen Lang's silent classic, Metropolis (1926), and both were impressed. Goebbels insisted that Lang stay in Germany and make films for the Nazis. But Lang feared that Goebbels would discover that his mother was Jewish and soon fled Germany, leaving considerable funds, all his memoirs, and a primitive art collection behind. Lorre, who was also Jewish and was Hitler's favorite actor, also fled to England as soon as he could.
Story revised and retold. The American version of M was originally released in German with English subtitles. Although this print was purportedly replaced by a dubbed version made in England, it isn't available and indeed may never have existed. In 1998, a remastered version was released, restoring original footage, including the complete ending to the film.
Seymour Nebenzal, who produced the original M, remade an English-speaking version for Columbia in 1950. Lang declined to direct it when asked and Lorre was too old to play a role he would rather forget anyway, thanks to the typecasting it earned him. David Wayne took on the difficult assignment under Joseph Losey's direction, but it came nowhere near the original.
- Analysis of M from Film & the Critical Eye by Dennis DeNitto and William Herman. (also in the reserve folder)
- Roger Ebert's review of the recently remastered video release