Although Fritz Lang is more famous today for his silent sci-fi epic Metropolis, he considered M his masterpiece. We could make the case that many of his American film noir thrillers from the 1940s and 50s are equally fine — movies like The Big Heat, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street — but they all track back to this, a sophisticated and gripping suspense drama about the hunt for a child murderer, played with disturbing compassion by the great Peter Lorre.
M was Lang’s first sound film, and it’s thrilling to experience how this master technician embraced the creative possibilities of the medium. In the same way, it’s a very early police procedural. Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, based the screenplay on the shocking case of Peter Kurten, the “Monster of Dusseldorff”, whose exploits were front page news in Germany in 1930, and they pored over police files. But even more importantly, this is the movie where Lang became interested in psychology — an aspect which would be the catalyst for his American career after the Nazis came to power. (Seeing M, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary: “Fantastic! Against huminitarian soppiness. For the death penalty. Well made. Lang will be our director one day.” In fact he was half right: while Lang fled Germany, von Harbou embraced the party.)
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 15-minute introduction by a local film scholar and be followed by an audience talkback.
A film from 1931 whose power and originality seem startling and fresh today—a film that has not dated—M evidences not only the most advanced command of camera, lighting and editing technique, but philosophically probes into the depths of sin and criminality, hate and redemption. It contains what must be ranked, still, as one of the ten greatest performances in the history of cinema.
Patrick McGilligan
Lang’s devastating 1931 serial killer template-setter has lost none of its radical, gripping power and intensity… One of cinema’s most convincing portraits of a sick society, in which the hapless Beckert is less an aberration, more the inevitable, even pitiable, end product. One can only imagine the ripples of unease it must have caused in an economically-ravaged nation teetering on the brink of totalitarian meltdown.
Time Out
This astonishing movie represents an unsurpassed grand synthesis of storytelling.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Fritz Lang
Peter Lorre, Ellen Widmann, Inge Landgut
Germany
1931
In German with English subtitles
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Credits
Producer
Seymour Nebenzal
Screenwriter
Thea von Harbou, Fritz Lang
Cinematography
Fritz Arno Wagner
Editor
Paul Falkenberg
Production Design
Emil Hasler, Karl Vollbrecht
Also in This Series
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Fantasia
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Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
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Antonia's Line
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The Leopard
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Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
