As someone who grew up loving Bugs Bunny and the other Looney Tunes, I saw plenty of caricatures of old Hollywood actors whose names and faces I only knew from those old cartoons. And Peter Lorre sure was a popular actor to use. Those baggy eyes and that distinctive voice made him a presence, often as the face of some silly evil like a mad scientist, in many of those old cartoons. It was almost disappointing when I finally saw him in something for real, but the man was a beloved character actor for a reason. In fact, I was surprised to learn he was Hungarian, and was just better at using an American-sounding accent than fellow countryman Bela Lugosi.
As it is, I have been really wanting to see him in the German language M for quite some time. I’ve seen it mentioned on many “best of” lists for a variety of reasons, and I know director Fritz Lang considered it his best work. As it is, HBO Max has it and a lot of other foreign language films considered cinematic greats.
The film actually opens in a brilliant way: a group of children are playing a game that involves singing a song about a child murderer. The kids are corrected by a washerwoman because, well, there really is a child killer. We see the man in shadows as he slowly makes friends with another little girl, cutting back to the girl’s mother who works away, unaware her child will not be coming home. Yes, this movie opens with a slow, suspenseful murder of a little girl. It’s not a movie that seems to be willing to pull punches. Arguably, it does in the last minute or so, but the movie itself is still excellent, so I don’t much mind.
However, a child killer running around in Depression-era Berlin is going to put pressure on the police, and they use all the methods at their disposal to try to find the guy, especially after he starts writing taunting letters to them. The citizens are paranoid and accusing anyone who even looks at a kid in a suspicious manner of being the killer. The cops, in turn, crack down hard on the city’s underworld. That pressure causes the city’s criminals to likewise begin their own search. The cops have modern methods like fingerprinting and handwriting analysis while the crooks just have spies everywhere. It’s only a matter of time before the killer (Lorre) is found by someone. It’s mostly just a question of who.
There’s a lot to like about this movie. Neither the cops nor the crooks are exactly the “good guys”. The crooks are a problem for obvious reason–they’re crooks–but the cops routinely complain about how unhelpful the average citizen is, and whatever a modern American recognizes as “civil liberties” are largely absent. The cops use deception to get the information they want, posing as a tax agent to look around the suspect’s apartment while the landlady is somewhere else and outright lying to a man brought in for another crime to find out where the underworld is doing what it’s doing.
This being a 90 year old movie, I don’t mind tossing out a big spoiler here because this is the best scene in the movie: the underworld finds the killer first and puts him on trial themselves, approximating a more legitimate trial before they eventually go to execute him. The film up to this point has been incredibly clever, showing how the killer was discovered thanks to his distinctive whistling near a blind man, how he was trapped in an office building, and all while all parties are looking for him. Lorre then has a speech, one where he says essentially he can’t help himself. He’s sick, he knows it, and he can’t stop. He hates himself. He almost welcomes the death that’s coming, but he makes a point where he even says that unlike him, the crooks can stop at any time because they choose to break the law. It’s a fantastic moment in an already fantastic film, worth the viewing for that moment alone as it shows a bit of nuance in a movie where a lot of people are hunting the face of evil. How evil can the man be since even he hates what he does? What is the thing to be done for a man like this?
The movie doesn’t quite answer that question, instead ending with a mournful mother breaking the fourth wall to entreat parents to keep an eye on their children. But the journey to that point was very much worth it. Lang apparently invented the long tracking shot for this one, and there are camera angles that seemed more like something out of a modern movie than something its age. If Lang considers this his masterpiece, then he doesn’t seem to be wrong. Then again, Lang, like Lorre, moved to the United States and kept working. I may need to check out one of his English language movies at some point.
Grade: A
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