M (1931)

M (aka M-Eine Stadt sucht einen Mördor, Fritz Lang, 1931) A rash of child-murderers in the Weimar Republic led Fritz Lang and his then-wife Thea von Harbou to use it for what Lang wished to be a film about "the ugliest, most utterly loathsome crime."

He could only have topped it if he'd stayed in Germany and waited a few years. Indeed, when he was attempting to arrange the start of filming, he was refused the use of Staaken Studios, as the head of production was a Nazi and thought the working title—"Murderers Among Us"—would be critical of the up-and-coming political movement. One wonders why, if he thought that was the case, he wanted to be a Nazi Party member in the first place. Actually, given History and given people, one no longer wonders.

 

But, Lang's M had more things on its mind than just a film about a child murderer. Lang's films usually did.

Lang presents the emotional issue in one shot.

 

The film begins with an ironic sequence—children in a circle out on a street playing a counting-out game (where when a child is pointed at, they drop out, or disappear from the game) with a rhyme that has to do with a "man in black" who makes "mincemeat" out of children with a "cleaver's blade." One by one, children get eliminated. How's that for foreshadowing? The song is an annoyance to one of the women at the tenement who is taking her laundry up to be washed, and when she complains about the kids, the washer-woman says "At least if we hear them, we know they're safe."

Then, it's a good thing this is Lang's first film utilizing sound. And a cacophonous world it is, with street-noises, off-screen alarms and sirens...even the passage of time when her little girl doesn't arrive for her regular lunch is emphasized mockingly with a cuckoo clock. In fact, after the titles, the first thing we hear is that children's on-the-nose game-chant. When the little girl is late, the woman no longer depends on sound and goes looking, asking the other kids coming up the stairs if they'd seen her. Then, as if to emphasize that she's not coming, Lang shows her empty place at the table, the yawning empty staircase to her flat, the still basement—then, outside, telephone wires to which gets stuck a balloon that we had seen a man buying for her, then the girl's ball as it rolls...and becomes still.

Horrible things are done in this film, but Lang shows them off-screen, suggestively, and lets the audience do the dirty work, making us culpable. But, we're not alone in this. As fear grips the city, everyone becomes suspicious of each other. Talking to a kid on the street? You could be the murderer! The accusations are made directly to the camera, as if we're the guilty ones. Suspicions turn into accusations, and the police, under considerable political pressure starts to ramp up their investigation, looking in all those empty spaces for victims, rousting criminal hang-outs for clues, making the city sweat, especially those dens of iniquity where aberrant behavior are ever-present.

While the populace looks over their shoulders, buying up the hysterical headlines in the newspaper, squinting at any suspicious activity (or even not suspicious!), the criminal element begins to feel the heat and they determine to catch the pedophile by the means the police don't have at their disposal—their own spider's web of a network utilizing beggars on the street to keep an eye on every child. The police, meanwhile, are narrowing down their suspects and starting to close in. It's just a matter of who catches him first, the authorities or the outlaws.

We already know who it is: we've watched him (Peter Lorre) work, watched him write taunting letters to the paper, watched at how close he gets to getting caught and slip away. But, it's the investigations that take him out of the shadows and provide him with a name and a familiarity. We've listened as he whistled "In the Hall of the Mountain King" and fretted, even if we haven't seen him, but felt the tension increase. Then, when he's been marked, we watch as he struggles to avoid detection only to realize that it's not the police he has to fear, but everyone around him. The tables have been turned. The populace are no longer potential victims, but potential threats.

Murderers as victims. Criminals as detectives. The audience as co-conspirator. Lang's film—his favorite of his career—subverts so many elements to such devastating effect that's it's no wonder anyone who wants to make a thriller—at least a smart, cynical one—has borrowed from Lang's playbook for many years. And his parlaying of a black and white world into one where the colors are switched was so alarming to the Nazi's that once they seized power, they banned the film in July of 1934 (although they did use clips of it in their anti-Semitic propaganda). Seems they didn't want any moral complexity for the masses. Black is black and White is right and they got to choose what was good and evil in the Universe (they chose wrong). Lang saw child murderers as vermin. But, he also saw vigilantism and mob-think as dangerous, as well. The message he said he wanted to convey was "watch your children" not only to keep them from harm, but prevent them from becoming monsters, as well.