M
d. Fritz Lang, 1931
Fritz Lang's M, the best of all serial killer movies, has not dated one bit 75 years after it was first released. It marks one of the high points of film as an art form; it's an infinitely fascinating portrayal of a criminal, visually astonishing, and subtly disturbing in its suggestions about the way we as a culture handle criminals. M is about the effects a child murderer, Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), has on a German city. At first, it's mostly the police and parents of young kids who worry about the killer. But once daily raids start happening, the criminal underground of the city has to join, which is to say they need to protect their own right to committ crimes. The film's body is mostly concerned with switching back and forth between all the different perspectives. In one scene we see the police trying to figure out how to catch the murderer, in the next we see the criminals complaining, and next we might see Beckert looking at himself in the mirror or writing a letter to the papers. Everything leading up to the final scene of M is quite brilliant, certainly an amazing achievement in sound design, cinematography, and storytelling as whole. However, it's this final scene that qualifies M as one of the greatest of all movies. For the first time in the movie, the audience gets an extended sequence, and Peter Lorre delivers one of the great monologues. It takes place once the criminals have caught him, and they plan to sentence him to death"I have no control over this, the evil thing inside of me, the fire, the voices, the torment!" Beckert says. And, indeed, the moral ambiguity and irony of this final scene is one of the high points of M, a true masterpiece of cinema, and essential viewing for anyone halfway interested in anything.
