(1931)

Starring Peter Lorre, Gustaf Gründgens, Otto Wernicke; dir: Fritz Lang

A Hitler doesn’t just spring up overnight, and M reveals in a frighteningly visceral way just how prepared the ground was in 1930s Germany for his ascension. M is an incredible portrait of a society at war with itself, killing itself from within. Fritz Lang’s masterpiece shows Germany’s loss of order as a society disappearing into an atomised existence of individual jungle rule. There is a complete breakdown of the social contract, paranoia in extremis - people are guilty until (dis)proven innocent, everyone is spying on everyone else – it’s a descent into madness.

In smoke-filled rooms the various levels are skillfully intercut – the executive level of cops, crime boss racketeers and big business all become indistinguishable as do the riff-raff and their street-level customers for bootleg love and hooch in the subterranean economy.

This is beautifully poignant filmmaking. M ’s symbolism as much as its absences speak volumes, especially of an alienated (stark geometric staircases shot from above) and de-personalised (empty spaces as the first child abduction is seen) world. It’s well understood now that its sound design basically writes the book on what’s possible in this art. Music is not just the hook for the plot twist but often used dramatically as mise-en-scene.

Less remarked upon is how far ahead it was in police procedural terms. Its documentary-style representations of the emerging science of fingerprinting predate by twenty years Hollywood’s by-the-numbers discovery of forensic science in postwar thrillers like the identikit portraits in 1949’s He Walked By Night and forensic profiling in Mystery Street (1950).

Viewed strictly as a thriller, a plot weakness is that there’s no false leads in its investigation phase, M being more concerned with the techniques of detection as it hones in on its suspect. But in its obsessive focus on the pursuit of ‘one’, rather than his winnowing out from the public, M denies us the vicarious relief of seeing the blameless exonerated. No one is innocent. The film’s original title, The Murderer Among Us, in the fervid environment of the time, earned Lang death threats and bans on its production from Nazi party members in the film industry.

It’s downright spooky to see motifs of Nazism deployed years before Hitler’s election as Chancellor in 1933: the rounding up of beggars, the geometric sign ‘M’ (the murderer/der mörder) chalked on the back of Lorre’s coat as the Star of David soon would be on others.

But these pale before the haunting images of the subterranean trial by the criminal element (interestingly reminiscent of the IRA court in John Ford’s 1935 The Informer), massed silently and brooding in tiered blocks of implacable institutional ‘authority’. That the State is functioning as a criminal entity has never been better portrayed.

And even though the crims do capture the child-murderer, Lang makes it plain that we are not to sympathize with these hoods, when he holds the camera reproachfully on shots of the legit security officers bound and beaten on the way to the child-killer’s capture.

Might is right, but the trial setpiece centers on debate over their right to hold him. "We are all law experts here – from six weeks in Tegal to 15 years in Brandenburg", scoffs the head crim and tribunal ‘President’, played by Gustaf Gründgens ("Our honorable President, who is wanted for three murders"), whose shaven skull and brutal demeanour make him a great ersatz Nazi, as he rebuts the defendant’s demand for a fair trail.

This President’s summing up, after Lorre’s testimony that he blacks out and does not consciously commit acts of evil (which the President twists to an ‘admission’), makes plain there is no rule of law here and this inquisition is a throwback to the dark ages. The court’s stated goal "to render you harmless, to make you disappear" is a chilling portent of The Final Solution. When the crowd chants ‘kill the beast, kill the beast’, Lang pans across closeups of their individual faces, underlining the fact that fascism is a mass movement, reliant on complicity.

In this climactic section Lang allocates not one but two strands of dialogue to highlight the conflict between free will and passive evil, comparing the killer’s inability to stop killing with both the court’s cold-blooded pronouncement of his murder and the crims choosing their life of crime. "This evil thing inside me", Lorre calls his uncontrollable driving force, prefiguring much of the postwar pulp fiction of Jim Thompson et al.

The criminals’ response to this admission echoes both the lone justice of frontier mythology and the talkback radio demagoguery of today in its desire for swift (and permanent) retribution and a wish to overlook any mitigating circumstances which might oblige mercy.

With Hitler’s ‘election’ just around the corner, the ‘volk’ would soon get their wish.

- Roger Westcombe

Further reading: From Caligari to Hitler - A Psychological History of the German Film, Siegfried Kracauer, Princeton University Press, 1947 (reprinted 1974).