"M" - Film Review

There’s a brilliant scene early on in M that perfectly establishes the entire film and its premise. A little girl bounces a ball off a lamppost; posted on this is a poster warning townsfolk of a murderer on the loose and out to get children. Cue a shadow drifting in from the right of the frame. It’s a deeply unsettling, expertly crafted shot.

The tension continues to mount as we witness the girl’s mother begin to get nervous that she’s not home from school and frantically start to call out for her. But from the crosscutting (which is used excellently throughout the film) frequently back to her daughter, we know her fate is sealed.

The town is in an uproar in the wake of the child’s death and looks to be on the verge of tearing apart and turning on one another at a moment’s notice. The police and underworld criminal bosses (whose business have been disrupted in the wake of the scandal) simultaneously try to track down the killer first and bring them to their form of justice. 

This was writer-director Fritz Lang’s first sound film. Previously he had made dozens of silent films, most notably Metropolis. Here Fritz makes complex use of the soundtrack, including narration, sounds offscreen, and a very effective and cool use of total silence broken by bursts of sound. It doesn’t sound all that impressive by filmmaking standards today. But in 1931, only four years after the first truly successful “talkie” (The Jazz Singer), it was an amazing feat. 

The lighting is also a thing of beauty. The film contrasts shadows and light to create a dark, sinister and foreboding tone. German Expressionism was one of the biggest influence on film noir of the 1940’s and 50’s, and it’s hard not to see a direct link between M and many of those films (i.e. Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon). When Lang was forced to flee Germany due to the Nazis, he ended up making films in the United States that would continue to pave the way for the film noir movement of the following years (including Fury and You Only Live Once).

Perhaps most memorable of all is Peter Lorre’s performance as pedophile serial killer Hans Beckert who has an abiding affection for whistling “In the Hall of the Mountain King” (similar to the way A Clockwork Orange changes how you hear “Singin’ in the Rain”, you’ll never quite see the song the same way again). He’s not just this one-sided maniac out for blood; he’s deeply disturbed and haunted by the terrible things he’s done. There’s an unspeakable sadness, exuding out from those big dark eyes, to Bekert in Lorre's hands.

The film is dated and awkward in places, and too slow going in the middle. It’s hindered by historical and cultural differences, and uneven pacing, that make the setup halfway through feel overlong even though it leads to a fantastic ending. And perhaps M works better as individual segments that don’t necessarily add up to a completely satisfying whole, but those individual segments are pretty damn electrifying and evocatively shot, even 80 plus years after its initial release.  

Grade: A