Topic: "M" Review by Zarban (mild spoilers)
Fritz Lang's M is a 1931 German expressionist thriller about a child killer case. I liked the film—it's often clever, and Peter Lorre gives a landmark performance—but it's not quite the masterpiece I'd expected.
The story is very simple: in an effort to appear effective while a child killer is on the loose, the cops squeeze the underworld so tightly that the criminals decide to track down the killer themselves. It's a very early talkie and so has almost no music and long stretches with no sound at all. It's shot beautifully (except for some very clunky dolly/boom work) and has some effective bits of humor and suspense.
But it feels like Lang wasn't sure if he was making a character piece about the murderer, a police (and criminal) procedural, or a parable about how communities deal with faceless threats.
As for character, Lorre is hardly present for the first 50 minutes, and we see almost nothing of him that isn't "the killer" (that is, we don't see him holding a job or interacting normally with people other than one scene where he buys some apples). And the famous use of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" as Lorre's whistled theme is very mannered. It's effectively spooky, but it's too complex to whistle idly.
Most of the characters aside from the killer are almost cartoons. The chief inspector is mocked by the criminals at his entrance but later appears to be strong and competent and then at times buffoonish (particularly in a bizarre up-angle shot in a chair that emphasizes his crotch).
Yet the criminals are not exactly depicted as geniuses. They are led by a dapper and rather militaristic man called the Safecracker, but most of them are pretty buffoonish themselves. And they are directly compared to the police using very arch match cuts between similar smokey meeting rooms.
As for procedure, we see a bit of police investigative techniques and the criminals' clever, more practical, and more ruthless version. And yet the police ultimately prove to be almost as effective in tracking down the right man. But undercutting the procedure is the fetishism of collections of objects (the possessions of criminals caught in a raid, the tools and silverware in a shop window, etc.). They're not tied to a collection of trophies from victims, for example, or anything else related to the murders. It seems to be a visual motif that merely decorates the procedural aspect of the film.
And as for parable, are the mob scenes of people misidentifying innocent people as the killer supposed to frighten us with the wrongness of mob rule? Because it's a mob that eventually captures the real killer. And the ambiguous ending doesn't help us decide who is right and who is wrong. To be sure, the film comments on 1930 Germany (Hitler wouldn't come to power for three more years, but the scent of fascism was surely in the air), but it doesn't seem to say anything particularly pointed. Even the scholars on the commentary remark on the film's ambiguity and inconclusiveness.
Last, the film is about 15 minutes longer than it needs to be. The killer is cornered at the 65 minute mark, when (in the Criterion release) there is still 45 minutes to go. The perverse sort of heist that follows is interesting and suspenseful but doesn't speak to character at all; then a protracted interrogation of a different criminal grinds the story to halt for nearly 15 minutes.
In all, it's a very interesting film and worth a look. It's certainly much more sophisticated than Hollywood drawing-room mysteries of the time and strongly reminiscent of Hitchcock's early work (Hitch worked in the German film industry for a while during the silent era). But it seems to be a strong character turn by Lorre wrapped in a thin plot, embellished with a thick procedural, and set in a vaguely fantastical dystopia. If that doesn't give you whiplash, you may well enjoy the ride.