[ April 26, 2024 ]
Tonight’s Saturday Night Classic is Fritz Lang’s, “M”. This film is nothing less than a masterpiece. It created the serial killer genre, long before Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs or Se7en. M was not only the originator of the genre, but arguably remains it preeminent entry.
Be afraid. Be properly afraid. The greatest creation of Fritz Lang’s career remains one of the most disturbing movies of his, or any, film-making era. Kevin Maher, Times (UK)
Few films are gripping and effective 82 years after their original release, but this one surely is. Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times
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Lang was an extraordinary filmmaker and his CV is littered with classics – the Mabuse films (1922, 1932, 1960), Metropolis (1927), Fury (1936), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), The Big Heat (1953) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) are merely the best known – but he himself regarded M, his first sound film, as his best, and it’s not hard to see why. Apart from anything else, it’s quite remarkable on a technical level: Lang’s highly inventive and sophisticated use of sound made it one of the most enduringly influential talkies, while the camerawork, by Fritz Arno Wagner, ensured that many of its images remain genuinely iconic.
M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Moerder (1931)
The roots of noir go back to German Expressionism, and there’s no movie that’s more German, Expressionist, or noir than Fritz Lang’s masterful — and finally restored — M
(1931). While this story of the pursuit of a child-killer lacks one of the crucial elements of the genre, the femme fatale, the other components of noir are here in force. There’s the dark cityscape, an unstable environment in which children play in the street singing chants about “black bogeymen” and murderers. There’s the paranoid pathology of the individual in the person of the twisted Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), who courts and kills his young victims for reasons he can’t express or fathom, and a frenzied mob that brings its own brand of justice against him. Many of the classic noirs of the 1940s and later owe a debt to M’s obsessive attention to the details of the manhunt, with the most minute aspects of police procedure rendered. Most important, though, is the sense of doom that colors the film, a fatalism Lang renders through chiaroscuro lighting effects and enormous high-angle shots that suggest a malevolent spiritual presence hovering above the city and guiding its denizens to their doom.
M
is based on the real-life case of child-killer Peter Kurten, the “monster of Dusseldorf,” whose crimes of the 1920s were still recent enough to resonate in the viewer’s mind. The film is divided into three
distinct sections. In the first, Lang introduces killer, victim, and the desolate urban landscape in which the crimes occur. The style here is oblique and impressionistic — shots of a blind man selling balloons, a little girl taking the hand of a stranger, a ball rolling down a hillside and coming ominously to rest. The director’s discreet rendering of the murder of Elsie Beckmann subtly implicates the viewer in what is not shown — as Lang wrote, “forcing each individual member of the audience to create the gruesome details of the murder according to his personal imagination.” Typical of the powerful sensibility at work here is a shot of the balloon Beckert purchased for Elsie, a crudely formed clown; separated from her hand during one of the film’s unseen “gruesome details,” it ends up helplessly trapped by telephone wires.
[….]
It’s generally agreed that M was critical in hastening Lang’s departure from Germany in 1934. The Nazis weren’t thrilled by the film’s original title, Murderers Among Us; they assumed it was about them and tried to squash the production, even going so far as issuing death threats. Of course, in a sense they were correct. M is about more than the landscape of an unbalanced mind. With its palpable air of dread and its direct indictment of mob mentality, the film draws with frightening precision the dark contours of Nazi groupthink.
Click below to view the film
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15 Comments
4 years ago
Vielen Dank! [Thanks!]
4 years ago
A “Fritz” again, thx Pam! We’re kinda corresponding on a deeper level. I know you understand me, but I must be very careful with every step I take. A little bit like with (“Jewish” atheist) Carl Sagan’s Golden Records: Will they ever be deciphered? http://b1ff5939f6.nxcli.net/2020/02/ex-nfl-player-declares-trump-americas-first-black-president.html/#comment-4815950403
It’s a “thought experiment”, Pam… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest
4 years ago
Reply to
Nori
Pam gives room, she isn’t invasive. She just wants to count from time to time all her fans before they swarm out to change the world again. Kinda redhaired mommy goose.
I like her, everyone has to like her. Often she’s so hard against her enemies, unconciously she’s looking for resistance and a “limit”. Is there really no-one who can finally deliver her?
I can understand her drive of “justice”, I’m very similar. There must be a place to rest and relax when you’re exhausted. Where you can charge your batteries.
4 years ago
Reply to
Nori
Pam is an untamed tiger, locked up in a cage, maltreated with sticks. She runs from one corner to the next.
She doesn’t know that only she can redeem herself. She is in full control of the “provocative powers” around her.
4 years ago
Reply to
Nori
In this regard, Zweig’s Schachnovelle was a try of an inner way out of the cage.
But he killed himself with his wife before the Holocaust even took place. Who benefits from that?
It seemed like a hopeless time. But the truth is, time is neither good nor bad.
4 years ago
Reply to
Nori
The excellent thing about chess is that it can teach everyone something, the passive ones the aggression, the aggressive ones the restraint. People like Pam and I are not used to looking around: “Where are we in chess, but at least we are threatened?”
4 years ago
Reply to
Nori
I have great difficulty in keeping my impulses in check, even though I display an amazing composure in public. I would love to simply reduce certain people to pulp.
I’m not even talking here about that pathetic morons who constantly downgrade my comments. These are just annoying sh*thouse flies that usually circle around excrements.
4 years ago
Reply to
Nori
NO! You shouldn’t beat the “Manic Street Preachers” (uhm “downvoters”) to a pulp!
No-one has da right to fo dat!
No: They should be whipped with a many-tailed whip until they learn to dance! Those ticks!
And believe me: With me they will learn how to dance (and to please a woman)! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birching
4 years ago
Peter Lorre barely made it out of Nazi Germany before it was too late. I guess for Fritz Lang it didn’t matter that his mother converted to Catholicism as far as the Nazis were concerned.
4 years ago
The real horror that was Nazi Germany was only a few years off.
4 years ago
For Pam: same motif, 27 years later. Of course it comes not near the ingeniuous “M”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Happened_in_Broad_Daylight
English subbed https://ok.ru/video/603323697806
Genre teleplay (Fernsehspiel) I learned the first one to try this after war was of Jewish ancestry (which you only learn from German Wiki https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Kehlmann).
Recently I read a funny quote (I have to look for who it is from): “Of course we Jews are the smartest, the stupid we get baptized!”
4 years ago
Reply to
Nori
The sad thing about Heinz Rühmann is that he separated from his Jewish wife for the Nazis. His career was more important to him.
4 years ago
Reply to
Nori
Ustinov learned of his Jewish roots very late. He lived and died in Switzerland. (If his genius director Kubrick sensed the Jewish streak in him?) Ustinov & Rühmann:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7oy38c
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7oy2c3
