Lang’s early directing years were during the Wiemar republic and the buildup to the Nazi takeover and it definitely shows in his films. Many of the political ideas expressed or interrogated during his movies directly reflected debates going on inside of Germany at the time, and this film is no exception. The positions of various characters regarding the death penalty for the killer directly mirrored both the pro and anti positions of then-current political parties. His next movie, ‘The Testament of Dr. Mabuse,’ was banned by the Nazi authorities in 1933 for being critical of the party, although Goebbels himself is said to have been a fan of his work. Lang fled to Paris not long after and was working in Hollywood by 1935.
The inspiration for the child-killer at the center of this movie is generally regarded to be Peter Kurten, the notorious Vampire of Dusseldorf, who murdered at least nine woman and young girls and attempted to kill many more in the later 1920’s. Lang himself disputed this and said he based the character of Hans Beckert on a number of German serial killers including Kurten, Fritz Haumann, Carl Großmann, and Karl Denke, all who were active in the decades just before the film. It’s more than a little bracing to come from a more Anglocentric film background, where until more modern times serial killers kind of start and end with Jack the Ripper, to learn in quick succession about a handful of genuinely disturbing men running around Germany at the very beginning of the twentieth century.
We’re still in the more genteel era of films where the atrocities committed by these killers are more implied than anything else, any violence kept off screen and the exact nature of the crimes never specified. As notorious as those killers mentioned above were, though, I suspect a German audience had no trouble filling in the blanks on their own.
The structure of the movie is interesting in that there aren’t any lead characters and it isn’t quite an ensemble cast. Instead the film shows two systems of people and power slowly organizing themselves to deal with a problem in their midst. There are individual leaders on both sides who make plot-important decisions but Lang is careful to show back and forth debates between numerous people as the characters jockey between themselves in an attempt to rid the city of a disruptive element. Hans Beckert, killer of young children, is considered embarrassing by the police and bad for business by organized crime, so both race to catch him in order to return to the status quo.
The police are ostensibly led by Inspector Karl Lohmann, played by Otto Wernicke. He’s a constantly smoking, strutting character who contemptuously deals with criminals and sees no reason that every business, hospital, and private residence shouldn’t be open to the cops to search whenever they want. The criminals are equally organized, lead by a ring of elite thieves in charge of specific areas of crime, lorded over by The Safecracker, played by Gustaf Gründgens. He’s a strict, precise man who holds himself with such authority that everyone instantly defers to his orders. Oddly enough this formal structure of crime was apparently based in reality, specifically the Ringvereine, or ‘ring clubs.’ These were formal groups where members provided each other with alibis and contacts and also financially maintained the wives and families of members currently serving prison sentences. Lang was apparently so fascinated by the story potential of these groups that he was severely worried that someone else would get a movie about them made before he did. However fact based they are the existence of this well-organized criminal group, extending down to a spreadsheet-making guild of beggars, gives the movie a faint tinge of dreamlike logic that I find appropriate.
Lang himself doesn’t give much away about how he feels about either group through his staging or directing, treating both fairly evenly. Originally I thought the movie was going to portray the cops as clumsy based on how they’re introduced. After several scenes establishing that the killer has claimed his ninth victim and that the citizens are starting to give in to mob violence and paranoia we see a high government official on the phone to the police commissioner demanding to know why they haven’t caught the killer yet. The commissioner tries to justify the actions of the force by saying their men are working around the clock and that the homicide division can barely find time to sleep. This happens over footage of cops yawning in the staff break room and detectives hunched at their desks grimly smoking. But then he starts talking about how impossible it is to catch a killer who doesn’t leave clues and as he explains the number of men he has picking through garbage and taking statements we see just that: officers finding trash in bushes, tired men with notebooks taking statements, searching fields, etc. He also explains the general uselessness of witnesses and public tips, showing two people almost coming to blows over the color of a girl’s hat and an irate family yelling at an officer after a pointless house search based off of a random tip. The conversation ends when the commissioner states that they’ve been sending nightly raids into all of the criminal dens they’re aware of.
We cut to an underground saloon where it’s made obvious everyone there is involved in crime to some extent, from streetwalkers to thugs. Then wave after wave of police vehicles come down the street and as they march down the stairs to confront the patrons we meet Inspector Karl Lohmann at their head. Someone in the crowd calls him “Tubby Lohmann” and the rest of the crowd start jeering at him, but he yells at them to be quiet and they are. The next scene is a nice little bit of business as the patrons have their papers checked, which clues us in to the fraught but somewhat collegiate relationship between the police and professional criminals. Most of the ones caught with fraudulent papers grumble but seem to admit that fair’s fair, one drunk happily admitting he doesn’t have any at all and happily being led off to jail. Lohmann is also established as being fairly clever, catching several people in lies and commanding grudging respect.
The scene ends with the bartender chastising the police for wasting their time when they should be catching the killer and then the scene switches across the street to the head criminals. Four of them are waiting on the fifth, the leader. They complain about the raids and how pretty soon it’s going to really eat into their business. The Safecracker finally arrives and before setting foot inside angrily demands that they close the blinds, which they immediately do. Thereby established as both careful and fully in charge he calls the meeting to order. The Safecracker gives a short, angry speech about how important it is to draw a line between criminals such as themselves and monsters like the child killer.
As he waves his arm to invite the other members to give suggestions a very clever match cut takes us to police headquarters where an almost identical gesture by the commissioner to his men starts a separate brainstorming session. The scenes will cut back and forth like this throughout. The officers start to suggest useless plans such as even more raids. Back to the criminals where one suggests that they start honey-trapping officers to find out their plans ahead of time. A cop says they should search every house and apartment in the city. A criminal proposes writing a letter to the papers saying that they totally hate this guy. An officer says they should ask for even more tips from the public. It goes back and forth like this until The Safecracker finally lifts his head and intones that the criminals will have to catch him themselves. Then the cops stumble across the idea of checking up on everyone who’s been discharged from a mental health facility in the last five years. The criminals decide to involve the city beggars, who are seen to be ludicrously organized in a scene where they count and log the bits of cigarettes and sandwiches they’ve managed to scrounge up during the day. In the meantime the cops have analyzed a letter they’d previously received from the killer and specify that during their searches they need to start looking for old wooden tables and red pencils.
At this point we start getting scenes following the killer himself, Hans Beckert, played by Peter Lorre. Although he’d been a stage comedian for a while previously this was his first substantial film role and it shot him to instant stardom in Germany. He also fled the Nazis soon after and found plenty of work in Hollywood for decades. He plays Beckert as a man consumed by his drive to kill, nervous and jumpy at the best of times but able to put on a child-friendly facade when necessary. He’s only seen from the back for the first fifteen or so minutes of movie, his face only showing after he’s scrawled a gloating letter to the papers, something the real-life killer Kurten actually did. We see him smile dissolutely at himself in a mirror, then tug at the corners of his mouth and bug out his eyes.
As the two systems starting moving towards Beckert’s end we follow him as he idly buys fruit from a stall, wandering and window shopping until he sees the reflection of a young girl. His face instantly goes slack and he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand like a small, messy child. His eyes close and he sways forward as a sudden wave of clearly sexual longing surges through him. He starts following the child, whistling the melody to ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ to himself, something like his leitmotif in the movie. The camera starts following the girl as she wanders down the street, the whistling coming from off-screen to let the audience know that Beckert is always just behind.
Luckily the girl comes across her mother so Beckert is forced to break off and steady himself with a couple of cognacs. He soon spots another one and as he’s leading her off his whistling becomes his downfall. Near the beginning we’d watched as he bought one of his immanent victims a balloon while whistling his signature tune to himself, and now that same balloon-selling beggar, part of the criminal network, hears it again and identifies him. Soon the network of near-invisible men are trailing behind him. One of the men writes a large letter “M” on his palm in chalk then pretends to stumble into Beckert, leaving an imprint of the letter on his shoulder, thus the title of the film. Beckert finally twigs to the group of men trailing behind him and runs, panicked, into a nearby office building to hide. The beggars alert the rest of the criminals and they resolve to break into the building that night to find him.
In the meantime the police have already identified Beckert through his medical records and have been unsuccessfully staking out his flat. During the raid on the office building, which ends when the criminals manage to find and subdue Beckert, they let one of the night watchmen pull an alarm. When the police arrive they find one gang member accidentally left behind who eventually folds and gives away the location of where they’re holding the killer.
While the interrogation is going on the criminals decide to have themselves a trial. It’s held in an old disused factory’s basement with rows upon rows of stone-faced criminals sitting in judgment. At first Beckert blusters that they can’t hold him, what they’re doing is illegal, they have no proof of anything, to which the gathered criminals give a hoarse chorus of laughter. The stark reality of the hardened faces in front of him soon puncture his bluster and he starts ranting about how they don’t know what it’s like to have urges inside that he can’t deny, how he can’t stop himself and is always amazed later at what he’s done. The Safecracker says that since he himself admits that he’s never going to stop they have even more reason to simply kill him and end things. He derisively describes how if he was committed to an insane asylum he’d just be released after a few years and be free to start the killings again. He’s been assigned a desultory defense attorney who states it’s not their place to kill an obviously unwell and insane man and that he should be turned over the authorities. The sides yell at each other stridently until the crowd decides they’ve had enough and start to move forward as one towards Beckert, at which point the cops show up and take him into custody. The movie never does come down on a side of the issue.
The movie wraps up extremely quickly after that. The first ten minutes or so of the movie are made up of a sequence tracking a girl never getting home from school. We cut between her mother, waiting at home, and flashes of the killer meeting her on the street and buying her little gifts. It also ends with a brief flash of trial judges getting ready to pass sentence on Beckert before ending with a trio of weeping mothers looking directly into the camera and intoning, “This will not bring our children back. One has to keep closer watch over the children!” Which is a bracing invective in these days where we’re constantly debating about helicopter parenting and the proper amount of independence to give kids. I suppose in 1931 Germany the idea that people needed to keep track of children and be aware of what they were doing was a relatively new one.
This movie was hailed at the time and continues to be considered a masterpiece and I’m forced to agree. I found ‘The Lodger’ a chore to sit through but ‘M’ was compelling from beginning to end. The camera work, editing, staging, and especially the sound design were modern enough that I had to keep reminding myself that in a movie made a hundred years ago a lot of this was revolutionary technology and film technique. Movies didn’t really look or sound this way until this was made. It doesn’t dwell too much on the psychology of the killer, possibly because the crimes that inspired him were so heinous that it’s likely that no interpretation would seem to suffice, so he killed because he was simply compelled to. We don’t get a backstory, we don’t really get any details, at no point does Lorre even attempt to portray him as sympathetic or understandable. The sequences where he’s stalking children remain as unsettling today as ever and I’m sad to say that its unresolved debate over the death penalty is still raging to this day. Amazing film.
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