One of five winning entries by Stephen
Hunter of The Washington Post that won the
criticism writing category of the 1998 ASNE
Distinguished Writing Awards.
Friday, August 29, 1997
"M" is for the many nightmares it gave to me.
That is, "M," Fritz Lang's 1931 dark masterpiece,
out of which sprang so much of the century's
bleaker popular art and some of the earliest
images of the haunting chaos that dogs us to this
day.
Alas, this "restored" version may represent a
heroic seven-year effort on the part of the Munich
Film Archive and it may well be the best possible
cut of the 66-year-old film available in years,
but it still seems to be in far from pristine
condition. And too many times the white subtitles
are projected against a white background, their
information completely lost.
So you can't see parts of it and you can't read
other parts of it. My advice: Deal with it like a
grown-up. The movie is somehow still necessary,
and its power to disturb remains profound. On top
of that, Peter Lorre's sweaty, puffy, froggy-eyed
portrayal of a child murderer remains one of the
most frightening images in screen history. All
moist flesh and grubby, fat little fingers,
infantile and pathetic yet truly monstrous at
once, Lorre's character is one of the great
monuments to the true squalor of evil. He is not
banal in the least, but neither is he dramatic:
He's a little worm with an unspeakable obsession,
insane and yet a horrible reflection of the
society that created him.
The film is constructed as a double manhunt. In
an unnamed city (the story was based on a case in
Duesseldorf, but many critics place the setting in
Berlin, where "M" was filmed), a child murderer is
stalking the streets. In a brilliant early montage
Lang shows us the young Elsie being suavely picked
up by her shadowy killer, led along streets and
into the woods. There's no on-screen violence, of
course, but the sense of menace is unbearably
intense, particularly as Lang signifies the
murderer's dementia in musical terms, having him
whistle a selection from "Peer Gynt" as the
demon's grip on his soul grows more fierce. Lang
polishes off the sequence with two horrifying
images: Elsie's ball bouncing across the grass,
losing energy, and reaching stasis; and Elsie's
balloon caught (as if in torment) in the suspended
telephone wires.
The cops, under great pressure, mount a massive
manhunt; they attack the only target they have,
which is the underworld. This completely upsets
the orderly nature of crime -- these guys are so
well organized, they even have a stolen-sandwich
ring! -- and so the crooks respond by attempting
on their own to find the killer.
In allegorical terms, Lang seemed to be getting
at the escalating conflict between the
increasingly inept Weimar Republic and the
increasingly efficient underground Nazi Party, and
the underworld, being more merciless and better
organized, is able to uncover the villain before
police.
It goes further. The original name of the film
was "The Murderers Among Us," which had resonance
that annoyed those thick-necked creeps in the
brown shirts. It was for that reason that Lang
changed the title to "M," for murderer and for the
mark of Cain that a beggar chalks on Lorre's back
so that he may be identified and tracked by the
beggars who are the reconnaissance unit of
organized criminal interests.
And, as a narrative, the film still works
brilliantly. It broke the mold before there was a
mold to be broken. Lang begins by completely
dispensing with the mystery elements; he reveals
Lorre at about the one-third mark, so there's no
whodunit. There's not even really a whydunit.
Instead, it's a who's-gonna-catch-him as the two
sides work frantically against each other. But
even when Lang documents the final apprehension
(in a brilliantly edited and timed sequence where
the cops are racing to a building that the
gangsters have all but commandeered as they search
it), he has a surprise. That is the ironic trial
of which the clammy little human mushroom, where
at last he speaks for himself, declares his own
insanity and the pain it's caused him and asks
them who they are to judge -- interesting
questions to be asked in the Germany of 1931.
But the movie is, perhaps, just as interesting
as a piece of film design as it is as a piece of
narrative. It was the domestic high-water mark of
German expressionist filmmakers, who were about to
be dispersed around the world by the rise of those
same Nazis, who would gain power in 1933.
German expressionism, which may have gotten to
its strangest moment in 1919's "The Cabinet of Dr.
Caligari," was essentially a visual version of a
treacherous universe. It was spread by this
diaspora of fleeing German genius (including Lang,
who went on to have a distinguished American
career) and came to light in the works of
Hitchcock and Welles but perhaps most notably in
that movie genre known as film noir, which
dominated the American screen in the late '40s.
To look at "M" is to be in the heart of the
noir universe, a shadowy zone of wet streets, dark
alleyways, secret places and impenetrable
mysteries. It's astonishing how modern this
six-decade-old piece seems, especially if one
focuses on the compositions and their meanings and
can see past the Victorian wardrobes worn by the
citizens of a German city in 1931.
"M," after all these years, is still a fabulous
movie.
M is unrated and while it contains no gore, it
does have scenes of extreme emotional intensity
suggesting violence to children.
From ASNE
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