M (PG)
1931. Directed by Fritz Lang.
Starring Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Grundgens, Theodor Loos, Paul Kemp and Georg John. In German with subtitles. 110 mins.
A man is killing kids in a large German city. Finding this one man among a population of 4.5 million would seem to be an almost impossible task, but surely not if one of them is Peter Lorre. The revelations about Jimmy Savile and the like suggest that paedophiles do at least have the decency to look creepy, and nobody looked so thoroughly nonce as the young Peter Lorre. As they surely should, the BFI are running a season of Lorre's films to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of this screen great, but re-releasing his greatest performance seems almost cruel - I swapped lines with Bogart and Grant, yet this, this monster, is what you want to remember me as?
The Hungarian born Lorre was a man caricatured by birth – short, bubble eyed and, once in America, possessor of an easily imitated, all purpose, foreign accent. However smart the suit you put him in, unseemliness just seemed to sweat straight through it. In his later Hollywood years, he was the epitome of shifty and seedy. In M, his first major film, a layer of puppy fat around the jowls made him almost indecency effective playing a sex offender. Eating an apple and licking his lips in a store window he looks like a piggy schoolboy; pleading for his life, he seems to turn into something more reptile than human.
I'm sure many of you react with scepticism to claims that some silent film, or work from the 1930s, is a masterpiece. Often these films are little more than historical curios, interesting but compelling. M is a film that has retained almost all its original power. The opening scene with children singing a sinister nursery rhyme and the camera craning (slightly jerkily) upwards to a room in the tenement where a mother is preparing dinner, anxiously looking down the empty stairwell waiting for her daughter to return, would impress in any contemporary film. The sense of a city under siege, the struggles of the police investigation are unerringly captured. This was Lang's first sound movie, but he got the new medium immediately and instinctively, both in terms of knowing how to use sound to enhance the image but also in knowing what aspects of silent cinema wouldn't translate to the new era. Five years after the hysterical melodrama of Metropolis this is as gritty and downbeat as a Cracker episode.
Boldly the film doesn't have a lead character, the perspective switching between hassled politician, frightened parents, the police and the criminal fraternity whose activities are being interrupted by the investigation, and who are indignant at being lumped in with this monster. The criminals decide to launch their own investigation and, Spoiler, catch him first. The film is about the need for proper justice, not to give in to the easy emotionalism of mob rule. A potent subject in early 30's Germany, but Lorre's performance is so strong it nearly derails the movie's message. His big eyes evoke sympathy, but even so, who doesn't feel a little regret when the coppers swop in just in time to save him from the mob's dispensation of justice
1931. Directed by Fritz Lang.
Starring Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Grundgens, Theodor Loos, Paul Kemp and Georg John. In German with subtitles. 110 mins.
A man is killing kids in a large German city. Finding this one man among a population of 4.5 million would seem to be an almost impossible task, but surely not if one of them is Peter Lorre. The revelations about Jimmy Savile and the like suggest that paedophiles do at least have the decency to look creepy, and nobody looked so thoroughly nonce as the young Peter Lorre. As they surely should, the BFI are running a season of Lorre's films to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of this screen great, but re-releasing his greatest performance seems almost cruel - I swapped lines with Bogart and Grant, yet this, this monster, is what you want to remember me as?
The Hungarian born Lorre was a man caricatured by birth – short, bubble eyed and, once in America, possessor of an easily imitated, all purpose, foreign accent. However smart the suit you put him in, unseemliness just seemed to sweat straight through it. In his later Hollywood years, he was the epitome of shifty and seedy. In M, his first major film, a layer of puppy fat around the jowls made him almost indecency effective playing a sex offender. Eating an apple and licking his lips in a store window he looks like a piggy schoolboy; pleading for his life, he seems to turn into something more reptile than human.
I'm sure many of you react with scepticism to claims that some silent film, or work from the 1930s, is a masterpiece. Often these films are little more than historical curios, interesting but compelling. M is a film that has retained almost all its original power. The opening scene with children singing a sinister nursery rhyme and the camera craning (slightly jerkily) upwards to a room in the tenement where a mother is preparing dinner, anxiously looking down the empty stairwell waiting for her daughter to return, would impress in any contemporary film. The sense of a city under siege, the struggles of the police investigation are unerringly captured. This was Lang's first sound movie, but he got the new medium immediately and instinctively, both in terms of knowing how to use sound to enhance the image but also in knowing what aspects of silent cinema wouldn't translate to the new era. Five years after the hysterical melodrama of Metropolis this is as gritty and downbeat as a Cracker episode.
Boldly the film doesn't have a lead character, the perspective switching between hassled politician, frightened parents, the police and the criminal fraternity whose activities are being interrupted by the investigation, and who are indignant at being lumped in with this monster. The criminals decide to launch their own investigation and, Spoiler, catch him first. The film is about the need for proper justice, not to give in to the easy emotionalism of mob rule. A potent subject in early 30's Germany, but Lorre's performance is so strong it nearly derails the movie's message. His big eyes evoke sympathy, but even so, who doesn't feel a little regret when the coppers swop in just in time to save him from the mob's dispensation of justice
