M

M is one of those movies that comes so early in cinema's lifecycle, it predates all conceived notions of whatever genre you however ineffectively try to slap a label onto. Is it a police procedural? Kind of, but only in part. Is it a murder thriller? A bit, but none of the murders are on screen, and the murderer, while known to the audience early on, is only glimpsed until the second half. One could point to a number of movies that can trace their lineage back to M from Psycho to The Sheep Detectives, but M is so prototypical, it's unfair to compare it. What can be said with confidence about M is that it is a strong (all caps, emboldened, italicized, and underlined) critique of Germany at the start of the 30's. If you're not a history person, the beginning of the 30's saw the collapse of the post-WW1 Weimar Republic in Germany and the ascendancy of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. Germany was, to put it mildly, going through some stuff, and that is evident in Fritz Lang's portrayal of his people in M, as a child killer terrorizes Berlin. The police are inept and bureaucratic; they have no leads, so they blunder about, using the murders as a pretense to bust brothels, bars, and any business or building in a low-income, high-crime area. The politicians want the crime solved for the political value, not to prevent more children from being murdered. The local organized crime syndicate is tired of having heat on them for something they, for once, didn't do, and decides to find the killer themselves if only to get the cops off their backs. Once the killer is found, the citizens of Berlin have zero interest in justice, only a desire for blood. Selfishness, ineffectiveness, and an inhuman view of humanity are how Lang sees Germans in 1931. M is as much a condemnation of his homeland as it is a story of a child killer. Lang's visual direction is amazing. There are so many shots and sequences that I could mention ... the crane shot when Beckett (the killer) is cornered at night in Berlin, as people close in on him from a number of angles ... the sequence of cuts at the beginning, when a mother is calling for her daughter Elsie, not knowing she's been taken but fearful of it, with a shot of Elsie's empty seat at the dinner table followed by her beloved ball falling out of a shrubbery and bouncing to a stop, unattended ... the slow pan across the assembled kangaroo court at the end, pulled back far enough to get the massive scope of it, but also enough to render the individual faces as unreadable, turning it into one big, angry mass of humanity ... you will be eating good if you like a director who knows how to use visuals in storytelling. What makes M a hard movie to recommend, though, is how its story is told. There is no protagonist. None. Not even someone you can say is kinda sorta. There is no one character consistently seen enough to qualify, and no one character likeable enough to qualify anyway. The crime syndicate boss is probably the most consistent character outside of Peter Lorre's Beckett, and that's stretching it. The first hour or so of M, then, almost plays out like the part in Willy Wonka where the search is on for the Golden Tickets, and Charlie just fades into the background as the movie becomes a whirlwind of news reports and scenes that only exist to portray the global madness. M is ALL THAT for 60-70 minutes. Cops, the criminals, questioning witnesses, a phone conversation between the beleaguered police chief and some politician as they argue about the investigation, and it is relayed in a way that zooms right past dry and moves on to arid. There is no score, the only music provided by the repeated whistling of Beckett himself; this can play to the movie's advantage (the sequence of cuts when Elsie is taken), but it can also render some of the long scenes flat and boring. And the movie's tacked-on ending feels like a political concession, so as not to paint the German people and its police in too harsh a light. M's weird format also means it suffers from the same problem as Citizen Kane: it pioneers so much of the procedural and thriller genres tropes and hallmarks (even if unrefined) that we've seen them all for decades by now. Seeing their earliest days in M doesn't feel as amazing as it would have in 1031; it feels dated and clunky, a movie burdened not by its own shortcomings, but by coming first. It crawled so future movies could fly. That's not M's fault, but it's a problem it can't shake. I can't say I'd recommend M to everybody I know, even if it is fascinating and a gorgeous movie to watch. It's altogether too dry in its presentation, and lacking a protagonist makes it a weird watch. But for the right kind of cinephile, the kind who can unburden themselves from the years of history and appreciate a movie as-is, it's an absolute must.