Movie Review – M

M (1931)
Written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou
Directed by Fritz Lang

David Fincher must really love this movie. Zodiac has oddly become a comfort watch for me, mainly because of the procedural nature of the story. Something is compellingThere’s about watching the various investigators – detectives, journalists, puzzle makers – stumbling through crime scenes & strange clues, trying to make sense of things while the city of San Francisco is experiencing an increase in paranoia & tension as a killer walks among them. Having finally watched Fritz Lang’s M, it’s evident that much of what I loved about Zodiac was Fincher’s riff on this German classic.

Children in Berlin play a macabre game involving a rhyme about a child killer while a woman sets the table for lunch. Her daughter is supposed to be home any minute now. A wanted poster is stuck to a wall, warning about a series of children being found murdered. Parents wait nervously outside the school to pick up their kids. Fritz Lang isn’t making a movie about a character but about a community and the effect of paranoia on it. A killer is on the loose, but no one knows who it could be. Accusations are flung about, and men innocent of this crime (though often guilty of others) are attacked by raving mobs. Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) is behind this all, his signature whistling of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” becoming an ominous warning that he’s near. 

When filmmaker Lang announced his following picture, titled “Murderer Among Us,” he was met with scandal and shunning. The idea of a movie about a child murderer incensed Germans at the time, and he received numerous death threats in the mail. Studio space was denied, with the excuse being the head was a member of the Nazi Party, and it was believed Lang was going to make a derogatory movie about them. He explained the plot and the ban was lifted.

To make the film, Lang spent eight days at a German mental institution, interviewing men who murdered children and were deemed insane. Despite all this research, no children are shown being harmed on screen. Violence is suggested through masterful cinematography and sound design. You can see the influence a film like this would have on someone like Hitchcock, who employed a similar technique of letting the audience fill in the gaps in his slasher Psycho. Fincher would use the same with Se7en, where the most gory & violent aspects of that film happen out of frame.

There are less than thirty years between M and the first feature film (The Story of the Kelly Gang), and Lang’s mastery of the form is stunning. This is one of the first procedural films showcasing the investigative steps. There are long, fluid tracking shots that genuinely challenge our perception of what was possible in cinema with the technology of the time. Beckert’s leitmotif of the song is a trope that would become ubiquitous in cinema. From our perspective in 2024, it can be hard to see through the mountain of cinematic ideas piled on top of each other for over a century now, but this is one of those foundational pillars upon which movies as an industry wouldn’t exist.

German expressionism was a wildly inventive form during the silent era, and M felt like it was the next stage in its evolution. The world is more grounded than in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but Lang still plays with structure and psychology. The German equivalent to the Italian mafia, Ringvereine, becomes an extrajudicial force, deciding to hunt down the killer, which the police seem incapable of doing. The cops’ nightly raids of bars and clubs searching for the murderer have messed up business. It’s a clever twist we don’t see much of in the films that have followed. And it speaks to some significant social issues in Germany at the time.

M was released during the Weimar Republic, the government that held the space between World War I and the rise of the Nazis. Capital punishment was an extremely hot topic of the era, with left-leaning people saying the execution of criminals was barbaric, while the reactionary right held that it was one of the only ways of maintaining order in society. Lang showcases the arguments from both sides but cleverly inserts his own views without needing a character to exposit. During Beckert’s trial, the prosecution is represented by one of the career criminals of the Ringvereine. This known murderer & thief argues that they have to kill Beckert, or society won’t be able to function. Lang wants us to question what sort of a society this gangster imagines. It’s not one where people live in peace but where his criminal enterprises are not disturbed.

Beckert is evil and guilty of everything he’s accused of. However, Lang thinks the moral erosion of a reactionary society is something to be just as if not more worried about. When the people become nothing but an angry mob, hungry for violence without it serving a purpose towards liberation, we are entering into dangerous territory. It’s stunning how relevant a film like M remains today. There is justified anger & rage among the people of the U.S., but it is not being guided by socialist or communist forces to promote a more equitable society. Instead, our institutions promote the most toxic of ideologies, so the angry people cling to book bans, transphobia, racism, and even the mindless support of genocide.

A child murderer is bad, but why, when it’s a lone killer, do we feel the need to act with impunity, whereas if it is a colonial occupying force, we look away and go about our lives? The argument made against Beckert in this film is essentially that some people are just so evil they have to be killed. That is the thinking of a warped mind. No one is born evil. We are socialized into holding destructive beliefs, often to benefit another, more powerful entity. Lang never pretends Beckert isn’t a depraved monster, but so are many of the people he shares Berlin with. 

Plenty of people go about ignoring horrific things happening to others. It is often too late when you only respond to what is happening in your midst. While 30-odd percent of the U.S. population is foaming at the mouth about drag queen story hours and transgender people in bathrooms, I see multiple headlines a day telling me how the upstanding cis white religious leaders in a variety of communities have preyed upon children. Sex education, one of the few tools in the American institution that teaches children about bodily autonomy and consent, is being shuttered in many locals because it’s been twisted into an association with the promotion of sexual assault. At a certain point, we must look around to notice that we’ve let the equivalent of Ringvereine take control of the national discourse. They’ve been directing it since before we were born. It seems awfully overdue that we do something about that.