“M” gave the movies its first serial killer, but it would be horribly reductive to label it as just a crime procedural. Despite essentially being a “silent” foreign film on the cusp of a new era in storytelling, Fritz Lang’s “M” is so overwhelmingly acclaimed and popular (it currently sits at #53 on the IMDB Top 250 with over 46,000 user votes) because it is a brilliantly calculated, masterfully chilling and intensely suspenseful movie that seems to be timeless.
Someone has murdered a series of children in pre-war (obviously, since the movie was made in 1931) Germany, but the film is not about the man but about the city itself. With no leads, the townspeople turn on themselves. Everyone is a suspect, no one can be trusted, and the ones doing the most to end the killings are the least trustworthy of all: other criminals losing business.
“M” was later used as Nazi propaganda material, but the psychological turmoil Lang conveys through the police force’s painstakingly thorough and systematic investigation and how nothing can be done to make the unease vanish is Lang’s own critique political critique on the incumbent Nazi party.
Think of how significant of a historical relic this film is. Here we are captivated by a film without a central character, without ever actually witnessing a murder and that is not just wordless but has near inaction and silence. In everything that is done, nothing is accomplished, and somehow this generates a whirlwind of anxiety, futility and even sexual tension.
It’s important to understand when watching “M” that the movie was made when directors were reinventing the ways they told stories on film. The movie was released only four years after the first “talkie,” “The Jazz Singer,” was released in America, when the sound craze spread nationwide.
For Lang, he continued to follow the strictly economical editing and cinematography rules that governed his silent films like “Metropolis,” but everything that simply makes our skin crawl in “M” is based not just on what we hear but what we don’t hear. One of the film’s most effective suspense trick is the killer’s whistling. It’s a simple, obvious device that’s become common place, but Lang must have been a pioneer in imagining that as the whistling got louder or faster, we would be told all we needed to know about the victim’s imminent danger, and further, as it stops, what had been done.
There’s also the scene in which the murderer is hiding in an attic trying to break his way out of a locked door. His clanking on the lock followed by his clanking stopping is what gives him away, nothing visual. It flies in the face of silent film standards perfected over three decades.
And it has possibly the first great sound performance in the legendary Peter Lorre. Lang’s camera doesn’t have to do much to reveal Lorre’s insanity. His eyes seem to pop out of his skull as he agonizes over how he must kill, how he has as little control as the other criminals who view him as a monster. His terrified tone builds and builds until we almost feel sympathy for this man. Who is the real monster? The man or the system? The murder or the society incapable of fixing it?
Lorre was presented so vividly to the world when he uttered “M’s” last words. From “Casablanca” to “The Maltese Falcon,” his work would never be the same again, but he always maintained his mystique as one of the great character actors. And Lang too would have a similar fate in America. Shortly after “M,” he fled from the Nazis and became a great director of noir. Yet his reputation too would always be compared to his German films, movies so fantastical and chilling that to this day they remain some of the best films ever made.