Fritz Lang (1931)
This picture was Lang’s first in sound. Eighty-one years on, has there been another film that’s gone further in dramatising the passion of a compulsive serial killer or the natural feelings of an outraged public – a public energised by vengeful esprit de corps? That kind of rhetorical question is a dangerous one for someone with filmgoing experience as limited as mine to ask: there is an answer to it though I don’t know what it is. I can say only that I don’t remember seeing a movie that’s in these respects more daring. The child killer Hans Beckert is based – according to Philip Kemp, who introduced the BFI screening of M in characteristically discursive style – on Peter Kürten, the ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’. Compare Peter Lorre’s portrait of Beckert with, for example, Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter – a performance which is rightly admired but which has a theatrical shaping that gives the audience a safe distance from Lecter’s words and deeds. (Besides, he is – most of the time – behind bars.) When you first see Peter Lorre on the streets of the German city that’s being terrorised by Beckert he looks so extraordinary you feel that anyone would spot and suspect him a mile off. This is not an anonymous-looking man who can merge into the background. Then you realise it’s the fat baby face and protruding eyes, the strange combination of tubbiness and shapelessness of his overcoated trunk that disarm suspicion: Hans Beckert’s appearance is too ridiculous to take seriously.
There are many wonderful passages in M. These include, just for starters: the opening elimination game played by children in the street, with a chant about the murderer; the balloon that flies away after Beckert has met his next victim, Elsie Beckmann; the quickly changing moods, induced by the sounds of a cuckoo clock, of Elsie’s waiting mother, who has prepared a meal for the little girl’s return home from school; the innocent old man who offers help to a child and is set upon by a suspicious crowd. Lang’s camera moves relentlessly around the city’s streets and architecture – there’s a particularly startling image of a disused building with broken glass in the windows. After an unsuccessful approach to another child, Beckert sits in an arboured street cafe, thwarted and reprieved. Just before picking up Elsie Beckmann, Beckert was whistling ‘The Hall of the Mountain King’ from Grieg’s Peer Gynt. When he hears that tune whistled again, the blind balloon-seller alerts one of his beggar friends, who tails Beckert then chalks an ‘M’ on his overcoat. (The ‘M’ stands for Mörder.) Beckert’s reaction to the sight of the letter and the sounds of his pursuers preface a terrifying chase sequence. This is perhaps the first time in the picture that you realise that, while you want Beckert caught, you’re ambivalent about the way he’s treated by the combined forces of the police, organised crime and the bereaved mothers of Beckert’s victims. (Elsie’s mother speaks the closing line of M so that the film ends on an unanswerable diminuendo.)
If I had to find fault with M, I’d say that the juxtaposition of the methods of the police and those of the local underworld (whose business is being interrupted by frequent police raids designed to find the child killer) is rather protracted, and the complacency of the police occasionally overdone. There’s also the usual difficulty for me of the unique timbre of Teutonic yelling. I couldn’t help thinking how often these brutal sounds were heard by people on the receiving end of the Nazis in the years immediately after M was made. But this is a superb film – at one level it’s a richly detailed police procedural but it is so much more. The melodramatic power of Beckert’s trial before a kangaroo court in the bowels of an abandoned distillery, and of Peter Lorre’s acting, is deeply impressive. The screenplay was written by Lang with Thea von Harbou.
19 November 2012
