M is first and foremost about the time and place in which it is set: Berlin in the early 1930s, the last days of the Weimar Republic before the rise to power of the Nazi party. Social unease is written on every frame of the film, particularly given Lang’s use of the kinds of expressionistic visual details that would come to define film noir a decade and a half later. The film seems to take place entirely at night, and even though it was shot almost exclusively on sound stages, Lang creates the palpable feeling of a deep, sprawling urban environment, one that is all wet concrete and stone, dark alleys and maze-like buildings.

Lang melds personal psychosis with public trauma by focusing the story on a child murderer (Peter Lorre) and how his spree of killing throws the city into a frenzy of panic. Lang doesn’t attempt to generate suspense through hiding the killer’s identity; rather, we know the killer’s face within the first 10 minutes (introduced to us, not accidentally, as a reflection in a mirror). Instead, Lang relies on a constantly escalating sense of panic as the citizens of Berlin feel their control slipping away with each subsequent murder. The specter of the serial killer, something that hadn’t been explored on film before, is one that can always undermine any sense of order and civility. The idea of a loner able to live among us, yet commit acts of such horrible magnitude that we feel compelled to label him “monster,” subverts everything the modern city and the ability of the government to police it is all about.

Because the police have been unable to catch the murderer for eight months, they resort to nightly raids throughout the city. This upsets Berlin’s underworld of organized crime, whose business is constantly being disrupted. They realize that the police will continue to do this until the murderer is caught, so they take it upon themselves to hunt him down in order to protect their own interests. They enlist the thousands of beggars in Berlin to become a kind of intricate network of spies, constantly on the lookout for anything suspicious. M thus hinges on the idea of one kind of criminal hunting down another, which brings into question the whole notion of “crime” and what constitutes “legitimate” versus “illegitimate” activities outside the law. To the organized crime bosses, their world of extortion and thievery is acceptable and thus worth preserving, whereas the sexually inspired murder of small children is not.

M was Lang’s first sound film, which is obvious in the way he still relies heavily on visuals to tell his story. The film features virtuoso camerawork, including a stunning long-take crane shot that maneuvers throughout a building where the beggars spend their time drinking and playing cards, then moves up to the building’s second story and through a window where the police are busy registering people. It’s an astonishing visual feat, one that directors like Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese surely take as a model for how effective a fluid, roving camera can be in creating atmosphere and supplying the audience with visual information. Lang is also a master of using everyday objects to suggest off-screen action, never so powerfully as in the opening sequence when a rolling ball and a clownish balloon sadly caught in a power line inform us of a little girl’s death. He is also particularly clever in his editing, using match cuts and parallel actions to align the police with the organized criminals, thus visually connecting enemies in a common cause.

M was clearly a film ahead of its time, particularly in its empathic depiction of Hans Beckert, the child murderer. Rather than being a simplistic villain, Beckert is depicted as a man at war with himself, which is made explicit in his pathetic pleadings to the kangaroo court the underworld subjects him to at the end of the film.

Lang and his coscreenwriter, then-wife Thea von Harbou, structured the film around the worst crime they could imagine—the murder of children—yet they refuse to demonize the perpetrator. Whereas most serial killer figures in the movies are either horrifically charming geniuses (e.g., Hannibal Lecter) or deranged lunatics (e.g., virtually any slasher film), Hans is a three-dimensional human being who can be separated from his awful deeds; in fact, the anguish of his life is that disjuncture between how he views himself and what he actually does, which makes him want to be captured. Much of the power of Hans’ character is directly attributable to Peter Lorre’s outstanding performance, which centers on the gravitas of his anguished humanity (unfortunately, much like Anthony Perkins’ complex work as Norman Bates in Psycho, it was a role that would haunt Lorre via simplified typecasting for the rest of his life).

Hans is a marginal figure for most of the film, originally introduced as a menacing shadow, but once he has been caught and dragged into the court proceedings, we see him as a frightened animal, not unlike the naïve children who are his victims, which is further emphasized by Lorre’s small, squat stature and round, boyish face. Hans is both criminal and victim, and we don’t need to hear any elaborate psychoanalytic explanations for his psychosis to feel pity for a man whose own mind is out of his control.

Copyright ©2004 James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Criterion Collection