61. M

1931, Fritz Lang

As M opens, we learn that a killer stalks the streets of an unnamed German city. He is a child murderer. The film moves to a shot of a young girl, playing with her ball. She bounces the ball against a column. On the column is a poster describing the few known details of the murderer and the reward for his capture. Suddenly, a shadow falls over the poster, the silhouette of a man. He whistles “In the Hall of the Mountain King” as he takes the girl away. He buys her a balloon. At home, her mother worries. Where is her daughter? Why is she late coming home from school? Before long, we cut to a shot the balloon floating against telephone wires, her ball rolls alone on the ground. Elsie Beckmann is dead.

The rest of the film is unlike anything else. There are characters, like Inspector Karl Lohmann and a criminal mastermind named Safecracker, who appear throughout the film, but the narrative follows no real lead characters. Instead, it skips around, showing us not only the police investigation, but the growing paranoia in the city, as any man who talks to a girl, be he her father or an elderly gentleman telling her the time, is expected. The police crack down hard, making it impossible for the city’s incredibly organized underground to operate. Because of this, and because they despise the murderer’s crimes, singling him out as unlike them, not a crook, but something else, the criminals begin an investigation of their own. The Beggars Organization blankets the city, watching for the murderer. When one of them, the balloon, vender, recognizes him from his ominous whistle, the beggars mark him with a chalk letter M, for murderer.

Before long, the criminals have him. They take him to the basement of an abandoned factory and they put him on trial, filled with disgust for what he did. The film does an excellent job of making you hate this man. He is a vile monster that not even criminals will embrace. The murderer is played by Peter Lorre and I don’t have enough good to say about him here. Peter Lorre is best known these days for playing the wormy guy in films like The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He is, essentially, Hollywood’s number one sniveling coward. Here, he is different. He is scary as hell, the ultimate, detached monster. When he comes on screen, you believe he is capable of what the plot demands of him. You hate him. Yet, in the trial, something strange happens. He breaks down. He begs the criminals for his life. This is where things change. Suddenly, Lorre is no longer frightening. He is a small and pitiable man. Lang, the film’s director, only complicates matters by indicating that Lorre’s character is a sick man, that he kills because of a mental imbalance. Lorre’s perfect performance sells every bit of it.

M begins as a frightening thriller and ends as a bizarre moral quandary. Is Lorre guilty or not and if so, to what degree and how should he be punished. Is street justice more effective than the police? Lang doesn’t answer these or his many other questions himself. Instead, he leaves it all to the audience, creating a film which lives on indelibly in the mind for years after the first viewing.