In this golden age of home viewing, the Criterion Collection still provides some of the best editions of the best movies ever released, usually with a rich selection of extras and often including audio commentaries (a feature they pioneered, and perhaps the greatest gift ever to film students and cinephiles alike). This column features one Criterion release per week, based entirely on where my interests lead me.
Fritz Lang’s M begins in the back streets of Berlin, where a group of children is playing a morbid elimination game. A leader goes around the circle, pointing at each child in succession, while they chant a rhyme about a “dark man” coming for them. Whoever the leader is pointing at when the chant ends is considered taken by the dark man and has to leave the circle. It’s exactly the macabre sort of thing kids love but that gets on adults’ nerves, including an exasperated neighbor lady who reminds them that she already told them to knock it off, asking rhetorically “Can’t you listen?”
Her remark is directed not only at the fictional children in this film: Lang is also telling the audience how to best experience it. Not just by looking, as they might with a silent film, but also by listening, because some of the most important information in the film will be communicated through sound. The choice of game is also not accidental: as M opens, the city has been beset by a wave of child murders (specifically little girl murders) and everyone’s a on edge about the killer’s impunity and the inability of the police to stop him.
M was Lang’s first sound film, and he was initially reluctant to use new technology, as were many directors who had already made their name directing silents. In fact, Lang refused to allow UFA to add a soundtrack to his 1929 film Frau im Mond, despite the fact that German film studios had recently adopted sound technology. When it flopped, he was blamed for not using the new medium, which was very popular with audiences, so he had to join the sound era whether he wanted to or not. What’s really amazing is how effectively Lang used cinematic sound without sacrificing the visual excellence that marked his silent films.
The villain in M is Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre in his breakout role), a serial killer of little girls. That’s no spoiler since the first murder occurs about 6 minutes in,and Lang reveals the killer’s identity before 16 minutes have passed, after slyly showing him first in shadow, then from the back, and finally full-face in the reflection of a mirror. Instead of focusing on whodunit, or how-will-they-catch-him, M is more of a parable about absolute evil and how the need to fight it reveals the commonalities among the city’s disparate populations. It’s also a supremely expressionist film rather than an attempt at naturalism, so the usual standards of Hollywood storytelling don’t apply.
The most obvious split in Lang’s film (based on a screenplay by his then-wife Thea von Harbou) is between the high and the low, the legitimate and the illegitimate. On one side you have the police and the legal system, on the other the criminals and beggars and near-beggar street vendors. Both groups want to catch catching the killer who is terrorizing the city—the police because they’re being blamed for allowing the murders to continue, the criminals and beggars because mass terror is bad for business. Lang emphasizes the similarities of the two groups, through means like cutting between similarly-staged meetings of the police department and of a gang of criminals. He also blurs the lines between legitimate and illegitimate businesses, for instance implicating the press* for capitalizing on the continuing murders to sell papers (today the equivalent would be writing sensational clickbait to gain advertising revenue).
There are aspects of the police procedural in M, which some trace to the New Objectivity movement then popular in Germany. Lang includes many shots of policemen going about their work, often using new “scientific” techniques like fingerprint examination, forensic handwriting analysis, and organizing searches within concentric circles around the site of the latest murder. It’s probably no accident that these are all basically visual techniques, which ultimately do not lead to the killer’s capture. Instead the extensive chase that finally apprehends Beckert begins when a blind balloon salesman recognizes him by the tune he whistles (Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt).
As good as Lang’s mastery of diegetic sound is, his employment of the visual language of film is even better. M is an expressionist film at heart, with great use of shadows, attention-getting camera angles, rainy exterior scenes, and smoke-filled rooms with indistinct boundaries. Many individual shots are so good you could frame them as art: two of my favorites are a shot of Lorre barely visible in a crowded, dimly lit storage room filled with all manner of junk, and the “courtroom” scene near the end where the criminals make Beckert submit to a “trial” conducted by themselves (he begs them to summon the police since he knows what they think of him). | Sarah Boslaugh
*Trust me kids, print journalism used to be big business. In 1931 Berlin had about 140 newspapers, some of them publishing multiple editions per day. Lang’s audience would have been totally familiar with getting their news in the paper and ink, as they say, and he frequently uses newspapers and posted notices to establish the date (which is a lot more fun than just using a chyron).
Spine #: 30
Technical details: 110 min.; B&W; screen ratio 1.19:1; German.
Edition reviewed: DVD (2 discs).
Extras: 2004 audio commentary with film scholar Anton Kaes and German professor Eric Rentschler; 1975 interview of Lang by William Friedkin; 1982 tribute to M, directed by Claude Chabrol, for the French television program Ciné-Parade; interview with Claude Chabrol; 2004 interview with Harold Nebenzal, son of M producer Seymour Nebenzal; audio excerpts of conversations between M editor Paul Falkenberg and a film studies class at NYU; featurette about the physical history of the film and its restoration; stills gallery; illustrated booklet with an essay by Stanley Kauffmann and an interview with Lang by Gero Gandert.
Fun Fact: About two-thirds of M was shot with sound, the remaining third without. In part this was to save money on renting the necessary sound equipment, but Lang also puts the silence to artistic use, using it to heighten tension and to magnify the impact of whatever breaks the silence.
Parting Thought: Weimar Germany had the death penalty but rarely applied it; one example in which it was used was the child murderer Peter Kürten who, like the killer in this film, targeted mostly girls. We see a (real) courtroom scene near the end of the film but don’t hear the verdict pronounced. What point was Lang making by this omission?
