Film Review: M

Director: Fritz Lang

Following on from his huge success with the 1927 silent movie Metropolis (a truly stunning film that I could not recommend highly enough). Fritz Lang made his first sound film loosely based around the real life case of Peter Kurten, the Vampire of Dusseldorf, who was a serial killer in the 1920's who killed and sexually assaulted adults and children. The film struggled for funding and studio space as the studio believed the film was meant to depict the Nazi's but Lang settled the confusion and they were able to begin filming.

The city of Berlin is under attack from a mysterious child killer who keeps taking children away in broad daylight without being seen. We see Elsie Beckmann taken away by a shadowed man who whistles the tune of  "In the Hall of the Mountain King" by Edvard Grieg. The police begin a huge raid of all criminals and houses they believe engage in illegal activity in search of this man which enrages the criminal bosses who begin their own search for this man to end the scrutiny by the Police. All the while more children appear to be disappearing.

Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre)

This German language film is a very roughly cut film, there are many scenes where the sound is clearly being dubbed in afterwards and times where the silence actually feels like the sound has just been muted rather than the genuine sound of nothing. Obviously technology wasn't what it was now in 1931 but it's still not impossibly to achieve this if you compare it to other films of the time. A few scenes are excruciatingly long like the chase for M and the criminal finally revealing why he was searching an office block that was closed for the evening. But this aside it is a very intriguing and daringly subtle movie.

Nothing is really known as to why the killer is doing it except for an impulse to do so or exactly how or what he is doing with the children. There has been much debate as to whether the killer is sexually motivated but there is nothing here to suggest that this is true or false. Lang purposefully left the murders to the imagination of the audience saying that they could come up with a far more gruesome scene than he ever could. Peter Lorre's portrayal of the simple and childlike Hans is excellent even if it typecast him as a villain for future roles.

3/4 Sinister German thriller