The following is one of the papers I wrote for Film History
class. It got an A+ from my teacher, but since he graded on a curve I'm not sure
if it's really good or if I was the only one who took the class because I
actually LIKE film history.
This film is the story of a serial killer and the reactions to his presence
by the public and the police. When police efforts to track him down prove
fruitless, the city's criminals form a network of spies and track him down
themselves. The film's final sequence consists of a mock trial and a closer look
into the murderer's tortured mind.
The film is full of sinister foreshadowing right from the opening shot, of
innocent children playing a variation of "Eenie Meenie Miney Mo". But the
children's rhyme immediately sets the gruesome tone of the film, and succinctly
informs the audience of a string of murders before the film's
opening:
Just you wait a little while,
the nasty man in black will
come,
and with his little chopper
he will chop you up.
After seeing a mother nervously awaiting the return of her child, the film
cuts to a little girl walking down the street, bouncing her ball. She bounces it
against a wanted poster for the child murderer. The murderer's first appearance
is his shadow suddenly looming onto the poster, the shadow appearing to speak as
he asks the child her name, stressing his anonymity. Lang intercuts between
Elsie's mother getting more and more agitated and the murderer buying Elsie a
balloon and whistling, the tune getting faster and faster as he gets himself
more worked up. Lang keeps cutting from where Elsie is to where she isn't,
making very effective use of using inanimate objects and empty spaces to make
Elsie's fate more horrifying. When Elsie's mother calls for her, Lang shows a
number of still life shots in succession: the empty sinister staircase in a
twisted spiral with shadows like prison bars, to the empty gloomy courtyard, to
her place at the table set and waiting, to Elsie's ball rolling away on the
ground, to the forlorn balloon with it's string twisted in the telephone wires.
Without showing a drop of blood to the audience, Lang deftly conveys to the
audience that Elsie is never coming home again.
Lang then shows how the string of murders has frightened the public. People
are accusing each other, and coming to blows. In a bit of well-needed comic
relief, two witnesses only frustrate the police as their descriptions conflict
with each other, and a brawl nearly ensues. The man insisting that the child had
green hair accuses, "if you choose to believe a color-blind man, that's your
problem". A man stops to speak to a child on the street, and is immediately
viewed with suspicion, accosted, and finally dragged away by an impromptu mob.
In this scene Lang makes excellent use of camera
angles to show the man's persecution. When speaking to the child he is shot
straight on. But as soon as he's asked what he is doing speaking to a strange
child, he is now shot from a high angle, and his accusers from a very low angle,
accentuating the way they tower over him. This starts as a comic scene, which
just makes the pedestrians turned mob more frightening, as the more he protests
his innocence, the more riled the crowd get, the more convinced they are he is
guilty merely for protesting his innocence, and the more they grasp at him as if
ready to tear him to shreds. In the following sequence, an arrested pickpocket cries, "Why
is it you can catch pickpockets but not the kinder murderer?", some spectators
ask each other "Did he say they caught the kinder murderer?", other people hear,
and in seconds the police and pickpocket are fighting a bloodthirsty mob all
desperate to exact their justice. The public is so appalled and terrified by the
murderer among them that they become feral violent people themselves, so
desperate for a just conclusion the to situation that they lose all perspective
and go after anyone. Lang studies this "lynch mob" mentality more thoroughly in
his later film Fury.
Lang's tendency to use sound to contrast his images is shown again when the
head of police explains in detail all that his police forces are doing to track
the killer, mostly from off-camera, while the camera instead illustrates all
that he is describing, accentuating the documentary feel of the piece,(1) and
giving the impression that what is being shown is what is actually occurring at
the time the narrative is being spoken.
In the police raid scene, the bar that is raided is shown down a twisting
flight of stairs into a crowded and oppressive low-ceilinged basement, like a
den of rats. The captain and his men descend to the crowd followed by
their long menacing shadows, in a shot that seems to double their number. But
the people of the underworld taunt and insult the cops much like the students in
The Blue Angel, aware of the limitations of the police's power, and how far they
can go as a group to show their displeasure without individualized punishment.
They set up a table and laboriously screen each person one by one. The
confiscated loot is staggering. Obviously both sides have done this many times
before, and tensions are high. When a policeman tells the bar owner he doesn't
like it either, coming night after night, she talks about how useless it is,
because criminals wouldn't give shelter to this monster anyway. She says "Don't
you know how mad everyone is about this guy? Especially the girls. Sure they
solicit, but every one is a little mother at heart. Crooks get sort of tender
when they see kids. If they catch that murdering pig they'll wring his neck.",
which is nearly what they actually do near the end of the film. In another
example of foreshadowing, when the heads of the respective criminals unions are
impatiently waiting for Shranker to show up, one of them brags that the cops
couldn't have nabbed him - they have looked for him for six years and not caught
him. Another replies "but dogs can kill wolves". Later in the film, Lorre has
become an allegory of the rabid wolf killing innocent sheep, and the criminals
have become the pack of dogs that bring him down.
Ingenious cutting interweaves the milieus of the police and the underworld;
while the gang leaders discuss their plans, police experts too, sit in
conference, and these two meetings are paralleled by constant shifts of scene
which hinge on subtle association.(2) As they intercut, most or all of the men
attending these meetings are shown only in silhouette, accentuating their
similarity. The heads of these two groups are paralleled too, in their manner of
command, their similar use of hats and canes, and the leather gloves and jacket
that Shranker wears very much like the suits the head of police wears as his
"uniform" of position.
A parallel between the crooks and the murderer is also implied, as Shranker
says that the gangs must catch him themselves not only because he is disrupting
their business, but because "our reputation is suffering. The police are looking
for the murderer in our circles. When I run into a cop whole on business, he
knows the risk - so do I. That's the risk one takes. But we are not on the level
of this murderer. We must make a living. But this monster has no fight to live".
Sitting on a cafe terrace behind an ivy-covered trellis, with only his cheeks
gleaming in through the foliage, he suggests a beast of prey lurking in the
jungle.(3) The leaves both obscure and isolate him. Using sound, Lang
effectively depicts the moment when the murderer gets the urge to kill by the
increasing intensity and urgency of his whistling. A blind man, who is totally
dependent on sound, recognizes the murderer from this whistled tune. (4) Using
the whistling to track him down, a fellow beggar chalks an "M" on his hand and
pretends to be tripped by Lorre, marking the murderer so the beggars and thieves
can follow him.
From www.mninter.net
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