A Hitchcockian German Film That Hitchcock in 1931 Wasn't Yet Capable of Making
The "M" in Fritz Lang's 1931 crime thriller, M, stands for Mörder (Murderer). Made two years before the end of the Weimar Republic and three years before Lang left Nazi Germany for Paris, the film is part psychopathological case study of a child murderer (played by Peter Lorre) and part police procedural, with the workings of the criminal underworld added to a multilayered plot which examines mental illness, social stratification, police overreach, and capital punishment.
Lorre's masterful and scary portrayal of the killer, Hans Beckert, occupies less of the film's running time than is usual for a protagonist. He's more the film's catalyst. He appears first as a shadow approaching a little girl on her way home from school. His silhouette covers a reward poster pertaining to himself. He's already killed eight children. He takes his ninth victim to a candy store, buys her a balloon from a blind vendor, and later, in a park, her ball rolls into the frame, the balloon is shown caught momentarily in telephone wires. This film about zeroing in on a killer through various means of communication from street level word of mouth to sophisticated police technologies, has at its most delicate and painful moment the image of a child's balloon lingering in telephone wires, then floating away as something seen, probably by many people on the ground, but not seen by anyone as evidence of a horrible crime.
The police mobilize, search woods, houses, furnished rooms (including Beckert's). They have to go on Beckert's own letters to a newspaper confessing his crimes and warning them that he will not stop. In other words, he must be stopped because he can't stop himself. Later, during his "trial" before the criminal underworld that's gone to the trouble of capturing him (for the sake of getting the policemen's heat off of their backs), Hans Beckert speaks of hearing voices, of blackouts after committing murders. He is severely mentally ill. Should he be put to death or receive the help of psychiatric professionals?
John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, convinced a jury, with the aid of his lawyer, that he was insane when he committed that crime. He's supposed to have felt a hopeless love for the actress Jodie Foster, star of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, a film about a warped young man (Robert De Niro) who wants to clean up New York, eventually making a grand gesture towards an underage prostitute played by Foster--he shoots her pimp to death. Earlier, during his transformation into a self-styled avenger, he stalks a politician making a run for President. Hinckley apparently took all this to heart when he shot Reagan and three others. His insanity plea worked, he wasn't put to death by the state.
Fritz Lang's own views on killing were consistent: it doesn't solve anything. Did he sympathize with Beckert? Not with his crimes, surely, but Lang perceived the fermenting conditions of his society in Weimar Republic Germany with its government constructed after the disaster of the Great War, a weak state in many ways, weak enough to give way to the two-faced vision of strength and order presented to the public by the Nazis. During the Weimar Republic, German cinema achieved a world class level of artistic brilliance, with directors like Lang, F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu), G.W. Pabst (Pandora's Box), making numerous stunning silent films at UFA, a studio complex in Berlin that rivaled Hollywood's cinematic capacities. There, Lang made his epic dystopian science fiction film, Metropolis in 1926-1927. Metropolis was written by Lang's wife, Thea von Harbou, who collaborated with him on M and the scripts of eleven other films. She became a Nazi, stayed behind in Germany while Lang went to France, then to the United States, enjoying a directorial career lasting until 1960.
M is a deeply frank movie. Prostitutes, beggars, criminal lords, underlings, cops laughing about manipulating informers, the fat cigars smoked constantly by authorities compared to the cigarette and cigar stubs smoked by street people. In one scene, during a vice raid on a dive bar, a cop finds a burly man hiding in one of the women's latrines, each stall of which is curtained with just a blanket--a sad, drab little room where poor women go to relieve themselves. The top-down nature of 1930 German society, similar to the top-down nature of all societies based on class and the accumulation of wealth by certain segments at the expense of the great majority, shows itself in the police sequences, but also, in parallel, in the criminal sequences. The organizations are the same; tough bastards run both shows. Both, in the end, want to kill Hans Beckert. If the criminals do it, it's illegal. If the state does it, it's not.
Vic Neptune
The "M" in Fritz Lang's 1931 crime thriller, M, stands for Mörder (Murderer). Made two years before the end of the Weimar Republic and three years before Lang left Nazi Germany for Paris, the film is part psychopathological case study of a child murderer (played by Peter Lorre) and part police procedural, with the workings of the criminal underworld added to a multilayered plot which examines mental illness, social stratification, police overreach, and capital punishment.
Lorre's masterful and scary portrayal of the killer, Hans Beckert, occupies less of the film's running time than is usual for a protagonist. He's more the film's catalyst. He appears first as a shadow approaching a little girl on her way home from school. His silhouette covers a reward poster pertaining to himself. He's already killed eight children. He takes his ninth victim to a candy store, buys her a balloon from a blind vendor, and later, in a park, her ball rolls into the frame, the balloon is shown caught momentarily in telephone wires. This film about zeroing in on a killer through various means of communication from street level word of mouth to sophisticated police technologies, has at its most delicate and painful moment the image of a child's balloon lingering in telephone wires, then floating away as something seen, probably by many people on the ground, but not seen by anyone as evidence of a horrible crime.
The police mobilize, search woods, houses, furnished rooms (including Beckert's). They have to go on Beckert's own letters to a newspaper confessing his crimes and warning them that he will not stop. In other words, he must be stopped because he can't stop himself. Later, during his "trial" before the criminal underworld that's gone to the trouble of capturing him (for the sake of getting the policemen's heat off of their backs), Hans Beckert speaks of hearing voices, of blackouts after committing murders. He is severely mentally ill. Should he be put to death or receive the help of psychiatric professionals?
John Hinckley, the would-be assassin of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, convinced a jury, with the aid of his lawyer, that he was insane when he committed that crime. He's supposed to have felt a hopeless love for the actress Jodie Foster, star of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, a film about a warped young man (Robert De Niro) who wants to clean up New York, eventually making a grand gesture towards an underage prostitute played by Foster--he shoots her pimp to death. Earlier, during his transformation into a self-styled avenger, he stalks a politician making a run for President. Hinckley apparently took all this to heart when he shot Reagan and three others. His insanity plea worked, he wasn't put to death by the state.
Fritz Lang's own views on killing were consistent: it doesn't solve anything. Did he sympathize with Beckert? Not with his crimes, surely, but Lang perceived the fermenting conditions of his society in Weimar Republic Germany with its government constructed after the disaster of the Great War, a weak state in many ways, weak enough to give way to the two-faced vision of strength and order presented to the public by the Nazis. During the Weimar Republic, German cinema achieved a world class level of artistic brilliance, with directors like Lang, F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu), G.W. Pabst (Pandora's Box), making numerous stunning silent films at UFA, a studio complex in Berlin that rivaled Hollywood's cinematic capacities. There, Lang made his epic dystopian science fiction film, Metropolis in 1926-1927. Metropolis was written by Lang's wife, Thea von Harbou, who collaborated with him on M and the scripts of eleven other films. She became a Nazi, stayed behind in Germany while Lang went to France, then to the United States, enjoying a directorial career lasting until 1960.
M is a deeply frank movie. Prostitutes, beggars, criminal lords, underlings, cops laughing about manipulating informers, the fat cigars smoked constantly by authorities compared to the cigarette and cigar stubs smoked by street people. In one scene, during a vice raid on a dive bar, a cop finds a burly man hiding in one of the women's latrines, each stall of which is curtained with just a blanket--a sad, drab little room where poor women go to relieve themselves. The top-down nature of 1930 German society, similar to the top-down nature of all societies based on class and the accumulation of wealth by certain segments at the expense of the great majority, shows itself in the police sequences, but also, in parallel, in the criminal sequences. The organizations are the same; tough bastards run both shows. Both, in the end, want to kill Hans Beckert. If the criminals do it, it's illegal. If the state does it, it's not.
Vic Neptune
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