FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Fritz Lang - M 

The true horror has two faces: It's the face of Franz Becker (Peter Lorre), the child murderer. I always misremembered M and thought Franz Becker was the center of the movie. If you look at M again, it quickly becomes clear: That's not true. The focus is on the hunt for the child murderer by the police and the underworld. The hunters, these are terrible grimaces, just like those of Becker. When Fritz Lang staged M in 1931, he lived in Berlin. The right-wing mob of the Nazis was already raging in the city, while the left-wing mob was fighting against it. In this mood Lang combined two genres: M is a serial killer thriller as well as a police thriller. One that is grotesquely exaggerated! Let's look behind the surface of M - can we guess what would happen in Berlin after '33? M is a film full of hate. Lang must have hated Germany! It shows men in half-shade, in catacombs of the underworld, where they hold smoky conferences. They are ugly men who plan terrible deeds. Lang must have hated the Germans, the Nazis and again the Germans who levelled the ground for the Nazis. Already in his films of the early 30s the villains are clearly Nazis. Joseph Goebbels banned Lang's sound films later, but offered him to take control of the German film industry (in the sense of Goebbels). Lang fled. M is the portrait of a sick society. Lang's characters have no virtues whatsoever. Lang simply ignores the Berlin of nightclubs, the Cabaret-Berlin. Only once a bar is shown in M, but the camera doesn't concentrate on the glamour of such a bar, but shows greasy sausages in close-up. His thriller was inspired by a child murderer from Düsseldorf, who offered chocolate and sweets, promised friendship to his victims and then killed them. Lang ignores these murders. We don't see them, just hear about them. Once we observe a balloon that the killer bought a child. Now he hangs in the electric cables above the street. Long it is not about the identity of the killer (he does not try to build up suspense). Already at the beginning of the film we see Becker looking into the mirror. Peter Lorre was still at the very beginning of his career, with his baby face and the big Glubschaugen. Often his presence in the movie is hinted at rather than shown openly. Meanwhile the whole city is in turmoil. In the streets you see more policemen than girls, but without success in the search. The underworld therefore decides to catch the murderer on its own. Cops and gangsters become one. Both groups meet at long conference tables, smoke so much that their faces are no longer recognizable. M was Lang's first sound film and yet the dialogues remain sparse. He much prefers to show sausage-thick criminal fingers holding cigars, while people are advised how to take the child murderer down. The faces seem hard and cold and inexorable. Finally the Inquisition and Peter Lorre's long monologue. He screams out to kill his inner demons, the voice that commands him. He howls that he doesn't know how to help himself! Who knows what it is like to be HE? A performance that cemented Lorre's image forever. While Fritz Lang in Hollywood later delivered many M copies, Lorre played Becker again and again. Lorre, the eternal psychopath. No wonder that Lorre's most successful Hollywood movies were his Film Noirs. Again and again one demanded a movie like M from him. But nobody is as scary as M! Nobody so tormenting! M requires us to show understanding for a child murderer. As Becker himself admits, it is impossible for him to overcome evil. During one scene we see a mob throwing itself at an old man who is supposedly the murderer. Nobody in this mob is able to tell what is right or wrong. No one can control his actions. Neither can Becker. In the end, the mob is just as greedy as Becker to kill. It is not difficult to draw parallels to the Germans after 1933.