Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With the Denzel Washington thriller The Little Things hitting theaters and HBO Max, we’re looking back at other movies about detectives hunting serial killers.
M (1931)
“I don’t like violence, Tom,” Sollozzo tells Hagen in The Godfather, mistakenly believing that he’s just killed Don Corleone. “I’m a businessman. Blood is a big expense.” Four decades earlier, Fritz Lang devoted much of M, his ice-cold masterpiece about the hunt for a serial child murderer, to that very idea. Sure, the Berlin police do everything in their power to find the culprit, eventually identifying him via good old-fashioned detective work. By that point, however, it’s too late. The city’s criminal underworld, fearing that constant police attention—precipitated by the search for the killer—will put them permanently out of business, resolve to catch him themselves. Any number of movies have explored the symbiotic relationship between cops and crooks, but M may be the only one in which the crooks effectively become the cops… and then a collective judge, jury and executioner, putting the pitiful maniac on trial for his life.
Lang’s achievement is all the more remarkable when you consider that he made M at the dawn of the sound era—a period when filmmakers were still actively figuring out how their industry and job description had instantly, radically changed. This was his first feature with spoken dialogue, but he opted not to avoid audio hassles by locking the camera down, in a stagebound way, as many other directors did around that time. Instead, he simply allowed the film to be intermittently silent, devoid not merely of words but also of music, sound effects, or anything else. The effect is appropriately eerie, and allows for dynamic shots that wouldn’t otherwise have been technically feasible. At other times, he expertly weds divergent sounds and images—establishing a little girl’s death, for example, by playing the increasingly frantic voice of her mother calling for her with stark, sober shots of her ball bouncing to a stop, unaccompanied, and a balloon that she’d been carrying (purchased for her by the murderer) drifting into some power lines.
And none of the above even touches upon M’s best-known element: Peter Lorre giving one of the most indelibly anxious performances in cinema history. Hans Beckert, the child killer, ultimately becomes the film’s most sympathetic character, if only by virtue of there being nobody else who stands out. While there’s no doubt of his guilt, we never actually see Beckert commit any of his murders, and it soon becomes clear that he’s driven by a compulsion that he truly can’t control, and belongs in an asylum. That’s what his defense attorney—one of the criminals, assigned the case against his will!—skillfully argues in their kangaroo court, insisting that it’s wrong to execute someone who can’t be held responsible for his actions. Lorre’s climactic screeching monologue, as Beckert first angrily demands and then desperately pleads to be turned over to the police, is so raw as to be almost physically painful to watch. Lang stages a magnificent, wordless conclusion to this tribunal, which only reinforces M’s thesis that almost everyone in society exists on one side of the law or the other, and that economics can make for mighty porous borders.
Availability: M is currently streaming via HBO Max, the Criterion Channel, Hoopla (selected libraries), and Kanopy (selected libraries). It’s also available for digital rental and/or purchase from Amazon, VUDU, and Apple.
32 Comments
Without question Peter Lorries best performance. Both revolting and sympathetic. Its eerie as all hell to hear someone say they cannot control themselves in regards to violence. Its even worse when there are a couple cases of people describing the same thing, like Charles Whitmen. Also for extra irony, with how things end up in the decades after M came out… that guy was totally killed by the Nazis at some point. Adds just one more layer to the whole film. Its probably my favorite Fritz Lang film and I agree. Please see this film if you haven’t already, and if you have, why not again?
I haven’t seen this film in almost 20 years, but it still haunts me. Due for a re-watch. Some more Nazi fucked-upness: They used promotional art from the film to demonize Jews like Lorre .
Yes they did. A movie so good, it was just as propaganda to demonize others. Nazis really loved to plagerize.
They also took an 8×10 of filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch as a sign of “Jewish Degeneracy”.In case you ever wonder what gave To Be or Not To Be that extra bit of comedic venom…..
Lorre in M is a great contrast to all of his later less scary (or comic) villains. He is always great at hooded meanings and switching gears.
I love him in Arsenic and Old Lace. Brilliant actor.
I have not seen this but I saw the American remake, which is still pretty good. David Wayne is suitably pathetic in the Lorre role, and Luther Adler is appropriately sweaty as his “lawyer”
It’s SO great. Did you ever see the remake from (I think) the 60’s? It’s not bad but without Lorre it’s just not the same.I will say that I legit love Lorre in “Mad Love” and “The Beast With Five Fingers” but you’re probably right in that “M” is his masterpiece.
I do indeed recall at least one case in the ‘30s of a serial murderer managing to invoke insanity to escape the death penalty, only to meet his end in Nazi medical experimentation.
Yes I recall the person. Seems life imitated art in that instance.
It was on TCM…maybe a year back, and I watched it then.Definitely worth a re-watch.
Metropolis just about gets the win for me but this is a very close second. It’s a masterpiece and I live how its themes still feel modern. The locals in the trial may as well be commenters on a website like The Daily Mail. Another amazing film about mob justice and community hysteria (also centred around harm to a child – though, in this case, a false accusation) is 2012’s The Hunt starring Mads Mikkelsen. Very different in terms of guilt of the protagonist but gripping in terms of watching the fear, paranoia and need for justice in a community snowball so realistically.
It’s a brilliant movie. It shows Lorrie at his best. The scene where he notices the ‘M’ on his coat and is being followed is iconic.
I watched Ministry of Fear last night. I spent the rest of the night thinking about M and how brilliant it is. There are a lot of parallels between Lang and Hitchcock, but the former brings a really interesting visual style over from his expressionist roots.
I mean, you left out kind of one of the most interesting elements. He confronts them for the fact that they are all killers by choice yet feel they have the right to judge him. Interesting in light of the way they are equated with the police in the story.
The film is notable for being the first to use a leitmotif. Lorre whistles the main section of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” early in the film and the score eventually picks it up and it plays when he’s offscreen but nearby.
This is very untrue, unless you’re saying it’s the first talkie to do so (unsure of that off the top of my head). Wagnerian-style leitmotifs were in fact used to great effect in Lang’s own Metropolis, among others.
This film is of course part of the canon, one of those movies anyone who is really serious about cinema ought to see. It was remade in America in 1951 (not directed by Lang but by Joseph Losey). That remake is obviously overshadowed by the original’s reputation. But it’s a worthy film noir in its own right, and features a lot of great scenes set in the now vanished Bunker Hill neighborhood of LA, as well as the Bradbury Building, which has been featured in multiple movies – most notably Blade Runner.Here’s a more in depth write-up of the remake:
http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2006/07/m-1951.html
Anyone who thinks old movies are a bore really needs to have their eyeballs scorched by “M,” one of the most horrifying crime movies ever made and a high water mark for a director who could brilliant even on a bad day. Lorre pretty much coasted through his career once he made it to the States but he paid his dues and by many accounts enjoyed himself enormously (he was a notorious jokester) but he earned it with this part alone.If anyone is curious, Randy Newman essentially retold this story to chilling effect on “Little Crimminals”:
Other than maybe 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, did Lorre ever get a part that didn’t require him to be creepy and/or pathetic?
Do you count Ugarte from “Casablanca”? He really craved Rick’s approval, but I don’t know if I’d call it “pathetic.”Then again, it was just a small supporting role.
He’s downright heroic in The Mask of Dimitrios, and in Three Strangers he’s sweet, sympathetic and he even gets the girl. I haven’t seen all of his movies, but I’ve seen a good number of them, and I don’t remember that ever happening before.
I’d definitely put Ugarte in the “pathetic” category, albeit brilliantly so, like every other performance in that movie. And I’m not sure what to do with the Mr. Moto series. He’s intelligent, brave and multifaceted, but also weighed down with Orientalist nonsense and the inherent grossness of yellowface, so the net result is ultimately pretty creepy.
Beat me to it, StillHallah!
The Mask of Dimitrios is wonderful film. Hell anytime Lorre and Greenstreet are on screen together ( The Maltese Falcon, Passage to Marseille, Three Strangers), everything else in the world stops.
A Coffin For Dimitrois , WB 1944 — he plays a mystery writer who gets wrapped up in the real-life mystery of what happened to criminal Dimitrois Makropoulos that gets a bit too real, especially one the writer hooks up with Sydney Greenstreet’s smugger Mr. Peters.
Imagine Citizen Kane if Kane was actually Keyser Soze — or those who’ve seen it, Orson Welles’s own Mr. Arkadin , which originated as part of THE ADVENTURES OF HARRY LIME, an independent British radio series which future Jess Franco producer Harry Alan Towers created for radio starring Welles recreating his role as Harry Lime (and with Welles doing some of the writing, or maybe re-writing!).
Well, in Three Strangers (one of oh-so-many movies I own but haven’t yet seen), Lorre is reportedly the romantic lead!
The Verdict (1946), which I did see once back when PBS still regularly showed old movies overnight, is a murder mystery featuring Greenstreet as an ex-Scotland Yard Superintendent and Peter Lorre as his artist friend and “Watson”.He’s not a pathetic character in either of those….
“Comedy of Terrors” (1963), in which he and Vincent Price play cheap, scheming undertakers? It’s a comedy, with guest stars Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone…..
A bunch of Germans villainizing a man for something he can’t control? Why does that sound familiar?
The ease with which Lang transitioned from silent to sound is still amazing. One of the all time great filmmakers.
I recommend M to every single person who’s looking for a movie to watch. I have a soft spot for Peter Lorre, but his acting in M is probably his perfection – just the sheer terror he expresses in the court scene alone makes me feel uneasy because ultimately I’m feeling sympathy for someone doesn’t deserve it due to his crimes.
This is such a great film, I really should rewatch. Lorre is phenomenal. By the way, Miami Vice did a version of the plot of M. Crockett, I believe, played the “lawyer” for the trial.