Anybody who knows me knows my biggest vice in life is true crime as guilty and gross as I feel about it quite frequently, and unfortunately as a true crime junkie you end up hearing about a lot of cases involving abused or dead children. So of course I joked to my main group chat of friends when I decided to watch M the other day that I needed to take a break from all the stories about dead kids I’d watched that day so I was going to put on a movie about a serial child murderer.
To be honest this might be kind of a short review compared to some I’ve written, because I don’t have that much negative to say. Some of the performances seem a little “big”, but so soon after the silent era that is to be expected and that is just kinda of body language analysis since I do not speak German at all. Also it does something that a lot of films of its era does, which I’m guessing had something to do with cameras speeds at that time, where instead of showcasing people naturally running it instead speeds up the film in ways that do not look remotely realistic and give off real Benny Hill vibes even when its a mob searching for “roped justice”. Those are about all the negative things I have to say about it.
The film looks extremely good for early 30s cinematography, in its appropriately named “expressionistic” style it so obviously influences decades of film to follow, with so many of its long tracking shots, unusual angles, blocking, and use of shadows and lighting influencing everything from film noir to the French New Wave and so much more. It puts you at constant unease whether we are watching a child killer on the stalk or a group of people sitting around a table heatedly discussing it, the vibes of looming death and outrage are heavy and palpable. It should be no surprise that Fritz Lang, after escaping the Nazi regime, would go on to have a pretty strong career in Hollywood as a director that would only grow in critical appreciation in the decades that have passed. One thing I particularly like about the sound design of the film is how silent and scoreless the vast majority of the film is, so that when the killer’s signature whistle comes up it makes all that much more of an impact.
As a creepy procedural alone it works very well, especially because you can see the hallmarks of serial killer investigations that would come much later such as modus operandi and the final confessions of the killer which are delivered with such wild eyed, physical triumph for Peter Lorre have a fundamental understanding of what makes somebody like that tick long before the concept of serial killing even became a cemented thing in society beyond your odd “Ripper”. However, I think what makes it truly a great movie is the explicit criticism throughout of authoritarian police state overstepping and mob violence, very notable being just a couple years before the Nazis would come to power in Germany and when they had already established themselves as a major force within the country. Lang takes every opportunity he can to level just as much criticism at the police, government and the hysterical public as he does the killer himself and gives a pretty passionate plea against lynching that presages some of his American films like Fury which started off as an explicitly anti-racist film before the studio made him change the characters to white but still has a similar effect. This is a film that has big things to say about society and almost all of them remain just as relevant today as they ever were.
I’m always leary about films that often end up on Greatest Films Ever Made lists because while quite a number of films I love wholeheartedy do, there’s also tons of dumb blockbusters which haven’t aged well (hello Christopher Nolan’s career) that make it on there depending on the source and a lot of more “artistic” films that easier to appreciate the form more than the package. More importantly, so few really live up to such a hype. This is not one of those films, for somebody’s first ever talkie picture, everything was perfectly in place to make a film that is every bit as good now as the day it was released.
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