Films in Focus: M (Fritz Lang, 1931)

A story of a murderer and a lot of hysteria

“M” is the story of a sex offender in 1930s Berlin. When the police, despite their best efforts, are unable to catch him, the population descends into fear-driven hysteria. Eventually, even the Berlin underworld gets involved in the search because the murderer is disrupting their business. Beggars are hired as informers to watch the streets. A blind man, of all people, manages to discover him and mark him with a white “M” on his back. At this point, if not before, the story takes on an ambivalent tone. You do not feel any sympathy for the killer as he runs from his pursuers and is finally caught. But the disaster in his surroundings, the hysteria and fear that ends in a bizarre lynch mob, which has long since passed judgment, leaves little room for a sense of justice. The famous plea of the perpetrator follows, in which he addresses his inescapable urges.

“M” is one of the first successful sound films in history, in which sound is not only used to increase the impression of reality, but also to convey meaning – for example, when the murderer’s ghostly whistling announces new threats, or when the search by police officers and criminals is cleverly intertwined. Visually and thematically, he picks up on trends that most people wouldn’t notice until a few years later.

Fritz Lang on film noir and against the Nazis

“Film noir” is one of those terms that describes the genre’s subject matter almost poetically (if you want to call it a genre, some prefer to speak of a style). The world of film noir is a dark one, dealing with crime (usually murder) in an urban setting. Harsh contrasts prevail, and the mood is oppressive – both aesthetically and in terms of content. “M” can be regarded in many respects as an early form of film noir, which only later came to fruition in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Lang, as creator of Metropolis and other major works, was anything but an unknown in German cinema. He was involved in the development of cinematic expressionism in the 1920s, which sought to tap deeper layers of meaning for film with grotesque backdrops, distortions and almost exaggerated acting performances. He adopts these stylistic devices for this thriller, turns down the lighting even further and mixes it with observations from everyday life. Gruesome observations.

Observations such as the way in which the most diverse sections of the population unite under one goal, with even beggars following the call for total compliance in the hunt for the murderer. Observations like those made before the lynch tribunal, when the defense attorney has to listen to his client being called an animal who deserves to die, and that the law is not being followed anyway. These were observations that could be made in similar ways in everyday life in Germany in the 1930s – even if it took another two years before Hitler’s “official” assumption of power. And even though Lang only later takes an unequivocally anti-Nazi stance, his unease about the state of German democracy is already evident in “M”. But it was not yet too late – the police can still show up in time, end the tribunal, and bring the murderer to trial “in the name of the law”. But when the mother, who has lost her child to the murderer, sadly remarks in the face of an official German court that nothing could bring her daughter back and that people just need to pay more attention to their children – then this is not only Lang’s warning about the murderer, but also about the madness that he has just hinted at. A madness that would endanger their own children even more than a single murderer ever could.

Not that anyone listened to him.