It’s hard to believe that Fritz Lang‘s ‘M‘ was made in 1931. This film is so bold, unconventional, inventive, stylish, dark and scary that even today, if it were projected or released with minor changes and modernizations, it would stir up controversy, alienate certain categories of viewers and win many admirers among other groups of movie fans. It is a film that can be categorized (if we really have to categorize it) as a psychological thriller like ‘Silence of the Lambs’ and at the same time as a document about Germany during the years of the rise of Nazism, a historical period that never ceases to intrigue and fascinate. After watching this film we can go back and better understand the works of filmmakers such as Lars von Trier or Darren Aronofsky.
‘M‘ tells the story of the investigation and public hunt for a serial killer who lures and kills little girls. This formula – inspired without respecting the details of real cases – will be continued and diversified, up to the Scandinavian thrillers or films like ‘Zodiac’ in the new millennium. There is not much suspense about the identity of the murderer, which is revealed to us quite early. The emphasis is placed by the screenwriters (Lang and his wife) and the director on how crimes change the society and how the community organizes and responds to identify and capture the murderer. The result is impressive.
1931 was one of the first years of sound cinema and the process was quite expensive to require licenses for every minute of soundtrack. The producers only had funds for about two-thirds of the total duration of the film, which is a little more than two hours in the version that was reconstructed after many decades of censorship and changes. Fritz Lang, making his first ‘talkie’, transforms this limitation into an artistic process, letting some of the action scenes unfold as silent film episodes. He is helped by the exceptional cinematography signed by Fritz Arno Wagner, who had created – among other things – the elongated and frightening shadows in ‘Nosferatu’. The gallery of characters created by the screenwriters is also exceptional. In catching the murderer, the police are involved, as well as crime organizations (disturbed in business by the increased police presence on the streets) combined with beggars’ unions. The cinematic portraits immediately reminded me of the paintings of George Grosz or Otto Dix. In fact, they are imagistic representations belonging to the same trend – German expressionism. Peter Lorre was at the beginning of a career that he would continue for decades, but his role in this film is probably the one that will remain in the memory of most cinema lovers. ‘M‘ will be the penultimate film that Fritz Lang makes in Germany before the Nazis rise to power and his American exile. They will ban the film shortly afterwards. Not without reason, because with this dark thriller Lang has created a truthful image of the mass psychoses that made the rise of the dictatorship possible. It is a revolutionary film in attitude, in visual power and in the amount of artistic innovations it brings. Lang‘s masterpiece and one of the best films ever made.