Review of M (1931) by Henrik H — 30 Dec 2009

Oh my friggin' god. This is a movie with a big letter M.

This was the first movie by Fritz Lang I've seen and the premise watching Lang's other movies after this one is extremely high. I'm really looking towards "Metropolis".

The story is about a pedophile/child-murderer who's shaking the foundations of every-day life in a German city during the 1930's. He goes that far that even the most underground criminals of the city start to look for him after the police push them too far with their accusations. The story is kinda based on Peter Kürten, although Fritz Lang never admitted this.

Peter Lorre is the antagonist in this one and -my god- he really does it. He looks like a hybrid between a balleyed fish and somekind of retarded child. And my god the last monologue by him. I can imagine the german audience in 30's watching this movie and seeing that guy telling WHY he has been doing such horrible things.

The movie was the first movie with sound by Fritz Lang and you can really notice it. Okay, the sounds are quite dull on today's standards, but you can really imagine Lang playing with the soundboard and the whole "new world" he has discovered in it.

Now, almost 80 years later, the movie is a grim and dark allegory of things to come in Germany during the 30's. For example, the little details like letter "M" in the murderers jacket, the melody of Peer Günt the murderer is whistling, the extreme manhunt and the sick personal justifications about what he has done are like watching the trials of Nürenberg. It's like Fritz Lang knew what was going to happen in near future and he made a total mockery of it. It's incredible!

I wanted to give this movie only 3 stars out of five, because the DVD-release I bought, was bad. The subtitles went missing every now and then and sometimes it was really hard to understand what they were talking about. I also found it kinda irritating watching the reel jumping up and down sometimes, 'cause why to do this kind of releases today, if you can fix all those little mistakes and technical flaws just by simply pressing a friggin' button on your keyboard. There was some kind of prologue/intro in the DVD about the content of the disc and the movie, but the translator didn't bother to translate them.