Day 13 - M

M (1931) directed by Fritz Lang

So on my blog dashboard, I've discovered that I can check my stats and found some interesting stuff. One, as expected, I am not pulling in many views, which is okay by me. That means less people in the world will know that I suck. Two, I probably personally account for over 75% of my page views which inflates my already paltry numbers and third, I have somewhat of an international audience! I don't mean to brag or anything but my blog touches every continent in the northern hemisphere. The entire country of India, with its population exceeding one billion people, has viewed my blog exactly once. Just wait until the word spreads! Ditto for Turkey, Hungary, Spain and Canada. Doubling those numbers is South Korea with two views and Malaysia is comfortably ahead of them with three views. What country loves me the best? Germany, with seven views. And I don't even drink beer. Go figure. If it were just two or three views, I'd pass it off as random occurrences but seven is enough to make me think I've got a follower! If you are reading this now, thanks! So in honor of my German constituents, I shall review the Fritz Lang classic, M.

"Who is the murderer?"

Before M, the only German film I had seen was the thrilling 2006 The Lives of Others, so I am totally unfamiliar with German cinema and its history. (Insert fetish porn joke here, and if you understand what I'm talking about, you definitely watch too much of it.) I have heard of the name Fritz Lang and the movies Metropolis and M, but nothing more than that. I wouldn't even recognize any of the iconic scenes from those movies, like the one pictured above. Indeed, while watching M, there were no "Oh, so this is where that scene came from" moments. However, even while watching M with virgin eyes, there was something vaguely familiar with everything I was watching. Then, it dawned on me, M was a forerunner of many techniques widely used today.

The movie opens with a group of children playing a game singing a rather grim song of a killer who nabs up little children. An adult who overhears the children's song is horrified and tells them to stop, setting the tone for a rather chilling story. An unknown man befriends a little girl on the street after school with a balloon and we can already guess his true intentions. Not shortly after, a rolling ball comes to a stop in a field and the ballon the man bought for the girl is seen floating away. Deed done. It is one of a series of recent child murders that has the whole city in a panicked frenzy. The police, desperate to capture this killer, tightens its grip over the city making it impossible for the common criminal to make a living. The criminals realize that the only way for all this to stop is to find the killer themselves, setting up a race between the cops and criminals. Which side will find him first?

One of the things that intrigued me about M was just how morbid the subject matter is. It deals with a serial killer, a likely pedophile, that kills children, something that would be shocking even today, let alone 1931. This was, as I'm casually searching the internet, one of the very first serial killer movies (earlier credit goes to Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 The Lodger) and certainly the first modern one with a police procedural structure. There is detailed fingerprint, handwriting and behavior analysis straight out of an episode of CSI or Criminal Minds. The majority of the film doesn't even focus on the killer, played by the excellent and creepy Peter Lorre, but rather the efforts of the police and criminals to find him. A remake of M's exact plot would easily be just as accessible to modern audiences as any other contemporary serial killer thriller.

While it would be easy to portray the killer as a cold heartless figure, Lang instead decides to humanize him, showing him as a sick troubled man who cannot help himself. While undoubtedly you want him to be punished for his crimes, you must at least understand him before you condemn him. The killer is played marvelously by Peter Lorre who looks like a wreck, eyes bugging out, sweaty, and nervous and despite being a killer, seems terrified half the time. The killer also happens to have perhaps one of the first instances of a character theme song, something that was common in opera but not yet widely used in film. His trademark whistling of the song "In the Hall of the Mountain King" immediately becomes associated with him, a technique that is commonplace now in cinema. (Think Star Wars.)

While film noir would go on to dominate the cinematic landscape for the next several decades, it owes its roots from German Expressionism and M is loaded with the dark shadowy black and white cinematography that would be so familiar to Hollywood audiences later on. There is excellent use of shadows and lighting effects in M that set an ominous and dark tone throughout the movie. While some of the picture is scratched badly and grainy, M has some remarkable cinematography.

M is a thrilling serial killer procedural whose format would be copied by countless future movies, but few have done it better. Not bad for an 80 year old movie. There are some slight hiccups along the way, as there were a couple lulls in the storytelling, but not enough to seriously knock such a landmark film.

Grade: A-