WORLD CINEMA MUST SEES: M (1931, dir by Fritz Lang, Germany) by SMC Founder.Programmer Craig Hammill

When Fritz Lang made M in 1930-1931 just outside of Berlin, he must have already begun to sense his days in Germany were numbered.

The Nazis were rolling to such power in those times that they felt the original title of the movie (translated in English as A Murderer Among Us) clearly implicated them. When Lang explained the plot was about a Child Murderer (played in one of the great all-time performances by Peter Lorre) who eventually was brought to vigilante justice by Berlin’s criminal underground, the Nazis relented and let the movie proceed.

What this says about the Nazis and the mindset in Germany at that time or the psychological ability to disassociate is best left to your own conclusions.

Sufficed to say, the undertones of a country compulsively moving towards murder and suicide still course throughout the movie.

M is one of the all-time great classics of world cinema. It’s routinely name checked as one of the top 50 movies of all time. It is still bracingly terrifying and modern up to this very moment, 90 years after its making.

The overwhelming majority of cinema dates at least a little bit.

M still feels like it exists outside of time.

The story cross cuts between different strata of a city dealing with the increasingly panic and anxiety caused by a Child Murderer who remains uncaught by the police.

From the very beginning, Lang and his co-writer/wife Thea Von Harbou, somehow make a bird’s eye view of systems cinematically gripping and fascinating.

We know the identity of the Child Murderer from the very start of the movie. In a chilling opening sequence, we see a Mother setting her dinner table and calling for her daughter. This is cross cut with her daughter playing with a ball being approached by the Murderer, bought a balloon, and then guided out of the city.

The sequence ends with the twin terrifying images of the ball rolling to a stop in the grass and the balloon caught in electrical wires.

From here, Lang orchestrates an ever tightening vice grip of cross cutting. We see the Police, the Murderer, the Parents, even the Criminals of the City all meeting to figure out where to go from here. The Criminals are so sick of being hassled by the police that they decide to find and apprehend the Murderer themselves.

The movie ends with one of the most fascinating sequences in all cinema history. The Criminals, disgusted by the Child Murderer (everyone has their values), put him on trial in a kangaroo court in an abandoned factory.

What makes Lang’s movie more than just an ancestor in style and form to David Fincher’s Seven, Zodiac, and countless other seriel killer movies (The Silence of the Lambs borrows not a little from M as well) is it’s formal decision to examine systems as well as individuals.

Very few movies have ever been able to adequately show that for all our individualism, we are also part of systems that, when disrupted, respond in strange ways. Only Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and High and Low (possibly itself inspired by M) and Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game and Grand Illusion really achieve the same ability to look at human beings as individuals and as parts of sub-cultures, tribes, groups. We might also look at John Ford’s Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath as approaching a kind of stunning poetry with this tension.

Lang, like Hitchcock, knows that cinema lies in revealing information NOT withholding it. He tells us everything we need to know in the first five minutes. From there, we are able to follow every movement of the groups in the city as they encircle the Murderer like an ever closing fist.

But rather than take an overly simplistic moral tone at the end, Lang fully gives the Murderer a chance to speak about compulsion and mental illness. Peter Lorre terrifies us with the clear compulsive pain and derangement he suffers from. It doesn’t excuse anything. But it does make us pause.

M ends both subversively and fascinatingly with an affirmation of the rule of law. Not the vigilante law the Criminals are ready to mete out. But actual courts, judges, trials.

The law is wildly imperfect and often unjust. Any minority in any country can tell you that. But the law also has been one of the only mechanisms that have saved us from the darkest, most violent impulses of human nature.

The joke was on the Nazis when they let the film get made. It was a clear condemnation of their thuggish, law-bending, might equals right ethos.

Within 3 years, Lang would be boarding a train and fleeing his home country. He was bound for America where he would continue to make a number of fascinating movies of searing social critique (the Spencer Tracy starring Fury is this programmer’s personal favorite US Lang). His wife would stay and write movies for the Nazis.

Nothing is ever easy in the present tense. M is one of the most insightful and incisive pictures into this human dilemma of all time.

Written by Craig Hammill. Founder.Programmer of Secret Movie Club