M
Dir. Fritz Lang
1931

As a teenager, I felt the most generic form of entertainment that existed outside the reality TV show was the crime procedural. Law & Order, Criminal Intent, SVU, Monk, Psych, Murder She Wrote, Columbo, Matlock, Poirot, The Closer, even the ones I didn’t watch like JAG and NCIS and CSI – these are more familiar formats to me than even sitcoms ever were. Fritz Lang’s M foretells a century of crime procedurals, a series that has spawned several official remakes and thousands of imitators.

Before M, the mystery story and investigation thriller were popular formats – but they tended to follow private investigators or super sleuths like Sherlock Holmes or Sam Spade. As a result, M actually has to lay an extended groundwork for the intensive labor of a manhunt. An early section of the film lays out the concepts of scouring a perimeter, having hundreds of officers interviewing self-reported witnesses, introducing the concept of fingerprinting and handwriting analysis. In modern procedurals, we accept these ideas because we’re so inundated with this story – M has to actually introduce them to a public who may never have learned about this kind of police work, and simultaneously invents the cinematic language that will be used to depict them for the next century.

The reason M survives as a masterpiece, however, is its cultural commentary and intelligence. M was the final film Lang released in Germany before fleeing the Nazis, his next masterpiece The Testament of Dr. Mabuse banned by Goebbels’ ministry of propaganda. The tension Lang feels about being a citizen in a police state is present in the film – while he does not openly portray the police as corrupt or fascistic, he does portray them as completely unable to combat the murderer. In fact, all they can do is create a public nuisance, harassing “the usual suspects” until the mob decides they’ll catch the killer themselves. Rather than a film about police justice, M becomes a film about the allure of mob mentality and how quickly natural citizens will give over to fascism and capital punishment. Without spoiling the climactic ending for anyone who hasn’t seen it, the theater which plays out at the trial of the killer is still queasy, exciting, and iconic. The film’s ending, on mothers declaring “No sentence will bring the dead children back,” is as thoughtful and reflective a final statement on the nature of criminal justice as the end of Kurosawa’s High and Low or Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.

Peter Lorre is largely considered to have broken out with M, previously a comedic character actor in small roles, and while I love later turns in The Man Who Knew Too Much, Mad Love, and The Maltese Falcon, he may never have been better than as this film’s killer. He haunts the film with his whistling of “In The Hall of the Mountain King,” a thoughtful early use of music in the still-nascent sound film format. During the film’s chase scenes, his face catches the expressionist light and shadow of this film to look both pathetic and a monster, his bulging eyes leaping off the screen. He is nowhere near cinema’s first great villain – Georges Melies played too many devils for anyone else to claim the role – but he is still a personal favorite of mine.