Remake a Classic?
Joseph Losey wanted Charles Laughton to play the child killer in his remake of M (1951), the Fritz Lang masterpiece reviewed elsewhere in this blog. Instead, he got David Wayne, a capable actor, but as Martin Harrow, one who lures and then murders small children, he doesn't carry the psychopathological weight of Peter Lorre in the original film. Laughton, had he played the role, would've been, I think, truly scary--his physical bulk combined with a friendly face making him almost like a friendly clown.
Since I've seen the original film, this remake hides whether or not it's good. Because Lang's film is so powerful and the story so riveting, it's hard to tell if Losey's version is good by itself. The remake sticks to the original story, mostly, showing some of the same shots, like the famous one of the child's balloon drifting away after the killer makes his move off camera. The premise featuring underworld thugs, street hustlers, gamblers, prostitutes, mobilized by the main crime boss, Marshall (five foot six Martin Gabel in the film's best performance), is the same as in the original film. Martin Harrow gets locked into the Bradbury Building (seen memorably in Blade Runner) and spends a good portion of the film menaced by a tightening cordon of criminals out to take him off the streets because he's creating so much heat from the police that underworld operations are threatened.
In the original movie the setting was Berlin circa 1930. Here it's sunny Los Angeles, 1951. The environmental difference is tremendous. Much of the remake was shot in LA locations, while the original was made at UFA Studios in Weimar Germany. Lang's film has a claustrophobic feel in keeping with the closing grip on the activities of the child murderer. Losey's movie has a wide open feel--it seems that Martin Harrow could just take a bus out of town to escape his adversaries.
Even so, the Los Angeles location shooting has an interesting look. Even the moving car shots are done with the camera inside the vehicles, an uncommon practice at that time.
What mainly separates the film from its predecessor is the "trial" scene, wherein the child killer is confronted by the underworld denizens. In the original this takes place in a large basement. In the remake it's an underground garage with a ramp and a sign at the end reading Keep to Right.
Here, Martin Harrow is nearly lynched by a mob of ordinary criminals, not the types of people given to snuffing out the lives of little girls. Harrow tells his story, how his mother taught him to believe that all men are evil. He took to killing children to spare them having to live in this evil world.
The general belief among the crowd is to kill him, though the police are on the way. The telltale sign, Keep to Right, appears in several shots, suggesting "Right Wing," as in the governmental forces then running the U.S. and influencing the Hollywood blacklist that was about to so strongly affect Joseph Losey himself.
Losey in this long scene was obviously pointing out the judgmental nature of right wing mindsets, but it doesn't work in terms of the plot of M. The classic film has been reworked into a polemic dealing with the political environment of early 1950s America, rather than a story of corruption among police and criminals as they attempt to reach a common goal. Losey's ending, thus, doesn't make sense in terms of the original story of a child murderer's disruption of society. Martin Harrow, in the remake, is just pathetic, someone fit for an institution housing the criminally insane. Peter Lorre's original performance, by sharp contrast, shows a repulsive human being, an outsider who nevertheless can't control his homicidal impulses. He moves for a while freely in society between conventional law and the law of gangsters, disturbing the peace of both, thus putting a target on his back.
Losey's choice to add a contemporary political flavor to the final scenes fails, I think, but it's interesting to watch.
Vic Neptune
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