Review of M (1931) by Stephen M — 17 Mar 2011

I may be barking up the wrong tree completely here but, having just watched M again for the first time in ages, I was struck by how the film seems to prefigure the work of Jean-Pierre Melville in certain key respects.

Firstly, as played by Otto Wernicke and Gustaf Gründgens respectively, Fritz Lang presents us with a police inspector and a gangster who are equally charismatic, thereby testing the audience's sympathy, a trick which Melville would make good use of, time and again, in his Nouvelle Vague noirs of the late Fifties and Sixties.

But rather than being a straightforward personality contest between the good guys and the bad guys, Lang's far more disturbing moral dilemma invites us to choose between the criminal justice system and mob rule in the question of what should be done with Peter Lorre's pathetic child murderer, who is beyond the pale of the regular criminal fraternity.

The director would, of course, return to the subject of mob justice for his first American movie, Fury, in 1936. Lang's fascination with meticulous police procedure in M is also very similar to Melville's in Le Samouraï, and I was yet again reminded of Melville in those scenes where the criminal mob uses the tools and techniques of its trades to close in on the cornered Lorre in a deserted office building, which is essentially a heist scenario with Lorre as the booty.