Fritz Lang’s crime thriller is frightening and humane, with Peter Lorre making its child murderer disturbingly pitiable. Some of the surrounding grotesques are overdrawn, but we would send anyone prepared for the subject to see it.
Fritz Lang’s M is a frightening crime thriller that deserves to be watched without any allowance for its age. The hunt for a child murderer supplies an urgent reason to keep watching, but catching him is not Lang’s only interest. The people conducting the search need watching too. The city’s fear is understandable, and the suspicion spreading through it is frightening in its own right. Lang gives that suspicion enough attention for the people surrounding the killer to become a substantial part of our unease.
The screenplay, by Lang and Thea von Harbou, makes room for the police and the criminals pursuing the same killer. Their shared purpose does little to reassure us about their motives. Lang takes the practical business of the hunt seriously, and the scenes of police work have an absorbing, methodical quality. He also makes us consider who benefits from presenting themselves as a defender of public safety. The pursuit remains gripping while giving us reasons to distrust the people involved in it.
Peter Lorre plays Hans Beckert with a vulnerability that is difficult to bear. We felt sorry for him, and were disturbed to find ourselves doing so. His frightened face makes the suffering of a child murderer something we have to consider, however much we would prefer to keep our attention elsewhere. Lorre does not make that response comfortable or offer it as a reason to dismiss the crimes. The performance requires us to keep looking at someone whose distress complicates feelings we might have expected to be straightforward.
Fritz Arno Wagner’s cinematography gives the faces and the objects around them an unnerving weight. The repeated attention to smoking makes a familiar social habit look unpleasantly compulsive. Paul Falkenberg’s editing lets cutaways and shots of objects do work that a more impatient thriller might give to another chase. These details keep the film tense without requiring a constant supply of physical action. We have time to examine what is in the picture, and that examination rarely makes anything feel safer.
Lang is equally deliberate about sound, using it to build dread around violence he largely leaves to our imagination. That restraint is particularly important in a film about murdered children, where showing more could so easily become an ugly way of holding our attention. We are given enough to understand the horror without being invited to inspect the damage. The sound and the attention to objects keep the threat present while allowing the film to concentrate on the search.
The film can push its disgust too hard. Some of the surrounding figures are so grotesquely drawn that we can feel Lang insisting on our revulsion before we have had time to look for ourselves. That occasionally makes the city less convincing as a place where ordinary people live. Lorre’s distress is more persuasive because it leaves us struggling with our response. The broader characterisation around him can seem blunt beside it.
For a serial-killer thriller, M spends an unusual amount of its energy making us wary of the people conducting the search. We tend to expect competence from the police and danger from criminals, and the shared pursuit makes those expectations less comfortable. Its 110 minutes reward close attention to the people as well as the pursuit. Give it an uninterrupted evening, and do not take the PG certificate as reassurance about the subject.
