M

1931 silent film with words

Rating: 20/20

Plot: A guy with giant eyes won't stop buying balloon animals and other treats for children, and for some reason, adults in the small German town have a problem with it. Maybe it's all the whistling.

I decided not to dock Fritz Lang points for M being situated in that weird transition time between the silent era and the talkies, primarily because I think this is the very best talking picture released in the five years following The Jazz Singer. Of course, like every other thought that I share on this blog, I'm typing that without really thinking about it and just picking an arbitrary amount of time period of five years. I don't like movies from the 1930s, but this one feels so modern. I think it's mostly the use of the montage and some unusual camera angles and this experimental playfulness. There's a montage of emptiness early on, one of those times when normally perfectly beneficent images describe so much more than words could. You get an abandoned ball, an empty chair, a drifting balloon. It's gripping stuff, somehow more disturbing than a scene where you actually see Hans strangle (or whatever) the child would have been. Later, there's an extended shot where the camera maneuvers over a bunch of lowlifes in a room, through a sheet of glass, and into a room with a couple little people and a guy with a peg leg. Lang throws out one of the finest examples of how to tell a story without a lot of words, and this could have easily been just as successful as a completely silent picture. I also like the almost complete lack of music which I think adds to the overall tone. Well, there's the leitmotif (the theme from "Inspector Gadget") which makes whistling sound a little more foreboding than it ever should. At the same time, there's this conflicting playfulness to the way Lang approaches the subject matter of little kids being murdered. There' s a scene where a table of gentlemen are arguing in a restaurant with one guy smoking this absurd pipe and another guy whose glasses keep falling off. Or another scene with titled camera angles during a disagreement between a really big guy and a really little guy. It's almost comical. And the first time we actually see Lorre? He's making faces at himself in the mirror, almost like Soderbergh in Schizopolis. And by the way, how many shots in the first half of this movie feature either two Lorres--like, the real one seen simultaneously with a reflection--or a Lorre seen through glass? It seems like a bunch of them which I'm sure means something. Peter Lorre's so good here although his eyes, nearly iconic, kind of overdo it. It's a tough character because on the one hand, he's murdering children and on the other hand seems kind of dopey, the former making you really want to respect the guy while the latter makes you not care what happens to him. (I'm joking, of course. Dopiness should always be applauded.) But his despicability is mixed with enough vulnerability to make him a pretty daring character for a 1931 movie. It's a great performance, especially for this transition period. These days, Hollywood would take this character to absurd levels and probably give him CGI eyeballs that have a diameter of ten inches or so. (That's another randomly-picked number, by the way.) One of my favorite smaller details from this--during the opening scene where some children are playing a game in the street, there's this kid in the back who can't stand still. He's got to be Fritz Lang's nephew or something because he would otherwise have been kicked out of the movie for being obnoxious. Or maybe he was left in the movie so that audiences would develop sympathy for Hans? I guess that's something to think about.