The roots of noir go back to
German Expressionism, and there¡¯s no movie that¡¯s more German,
Expressionist, or noir than Fritz Lang¡¯s masterful ¡ª and finally restored
¡ª M (1931). While this story of the pursuit of a child-killer lacks
one of the crucial elements of the genre, the femme fatale, the other
components of noir are here in force. There¡¯s the dark cityscape, an
unstable environment in which children play in the street singing chants
about "black bogeymen" and murderers. There¡¯s the paranoid pathology of
the individual in the person of the twisted Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre),
who courts and kills his young victims for reasons he can¡¯t express or
fathom, and a frenzied mob that brings its own brand of justice against
him. Many of the classic noirs of the 1940s and later owe a debt to
M¡¯s obsessive attention to the details of the manhunt, with the
most minute aspects of police procedure rendered. Most important, though,
is the sense of doom that colors the film, a fatalism Lang renders through
chiaroscuro lighting effects and enormous high-angle shots that suggest a
malevolent spiritual presence hovering above the city and guiding its
denizens to their doom.
M is based on the real-life case of
child-killer Peter Kurten, the "monster of Dusseldorf," whose crimes of
the 1920s were still recent enough to resonate in the viewer¡¯s mind. The
film is divided into three distinct sections. In the first, Lang
introduces killer, victim, and the desolate urban landscape in which the
crimes occur. The style here is oblique and impressionistic ¡ª shots of a
blind man selling balloons, a little girl taking the hand of a stranger, a
ball rolling down a hillside and coming ominously to rest. The director¡¯s
discreet rendering of the murder of Elsie Beckmann subtly implicates the
viewer in what is not shown ¡ª as Lang wrote, "forcing each
individual member of the audience to create the gruesome details of the
murder according to his personal imagination." Typical of the powerful
sensibility at work here is a shot of the balloon Beckert purchased for
Elsie, a crudely formed clown; separated from her hand during one of the
film¡¯s unseen "gruesome details," it ends up helplessly trapped by
telephone wires.
In the second sequence, which makes up most of the film, Lang presents
the two groups whose interests are most threatened: the police, who must
satisfy an hysterical populace, and the criminal underground, whose
economic interests are jeopardized by increased police scrutiny because of
the killings. Typical of the director, the film sees the police and the
criminals as indistinguishable, intercutting between parallel scenes of
each strategizing on how to "kill the monster." Some of the police station
footage has a fresh, almost documentary feel, as then-new technologies
like fingerprint analysis are methodically examined. Of course, in spite
of these innovations, it¡¯s the criminals, who have an extensive network of
spies and just as much at stake, who trap Beckert.
Beckert¡¯s capture and mock-trial are the subjects of the film¡¯s final
sequence. This is a justly famous scene, with Lorre brilliantly laying out
the template for all future cinematic psychopaths. An ideal casting choice
with his pudgy frame, bulging, mournful eyes, and panicked grimaces, he
dominates M in spite of actually having relatively little screen
time. His breakdown speech before the mob demanding his death gives a
wrenching look into the mind of a madman. "But can I ¡ can I help it?" he
screams. "Haven¡¯t I got this curse inside me? The fire? The voice? The
pain? ¡ Who knows what it feels like to be me?"
Much has been made of Lang¡¯s innovative use of sound in
M, and this aspect of the film benefits enormously from the
restoration of the print. Most powerful is the recurring use of a motif
from Grieg¡¯s Peer Gynt, a whistled phrase that becomes increasingly
more ominous, functioning as both a lure for Beckert¡¯s victims and the
cause of his downfall when the balloon seller recognizes it. (The whistler
is Lang himself, because Lorre couldn¡¯t!)
It¡¯s generally agreed that M was critical in hastening Lang¡¯s
departure from Germany in
1934. The Nazis weren¡¯t thrilled by the film¡¯s original title,
Murderers Among Us; they assumed it was about them and tried to
squash the production, even going so far as issuing death threats. Of
course, in a sense they were correct. M is about more than the
landscape of an unbalanced mind. With its palpable air of dread and its
direct indictment of mob mentality, the film draws with frightening
precision the dark contours of Nazi groupthink.
From
www.brightlightsfilm.com
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