M (1931)
by Bruce E. Parry
I admit to having done a complete, 180 degree turn-around on this film after seeing it with my Movie Group. The film is a classic. It begins with the development of the terror a German city is experiencing at the hands of a serial killer of children. The police cannot find any clues and are hamstrung in trying to develop the case. There are no suspects. Panic ensues in the city where everyone becomes a suspect. In reaction, the police are everywhere, harassing all the known criminal haunts, investigating every one of 1,500 “tips” they have received. This so disrupts the organized criminal element, that the criminals themselves decide to catch the killer, Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre). The movie then follows the twin investigations of the criminals and the police. The police finally get a clue and move in. The criminals spot the killer and follow him by marking him with an “M” on his coat. The criminals catch him first and take him for a “people’s trial,” where they all want to kill him. His assigned defense attorney valiantly, but hopelessly, pleads for the “people” to see that he’s insane and shouldn’t be put to death. In the penultimate scene, the police find the lair of the “people’s trial” and take custody of the killer.
The film was directed by Fritz Lang, who was a known anti-fascist. But the film was made in 1930 and released in 1931, before Hitler became the German Chancellor. Much of our discussion of the film was about the social context within which it was made.
My take on the film was that the criminal element represented a distorted view of the working class. The period in which the film was made was one of intense class struggle in the late Weimar Republic. If those depicted as criminals were not the working class, then the working class, as such, was entirely absent from the film. That seemed unlikely to me. But the leader of the criminal element, Schanker (Gustaf Gründgens) is disturbingly militant about killing Beckert, although he himself is wanted on three counts of manslaughter. That bothered me, but the entire idea of the “people’s trial” bothered everyone else in the Group more than it did me. I am not against the death penalty; I am against the way it is applied only to working class people, particularly minorities. The real killers: war criminals and politicians that kill hundreds of thousands around the world, and corporate executives who condone and create conditions which kill workers on the job and by destroying the environment, and allow poverty and death through social violence, are exempt from the death penalty. Besides, in the movie, Beckert has killed eight children and we, the audience, know he’s the killer. Furthermore, Beckert has been institutionalized before for mental illness. He was released as “cured” and after release, began killing. Concerns by the criminals that that scenario would be played out again should he be declared insane, seem real. I could see the point of view—put forth by the mothers of the victims as well as the “mob”—that they wanted Beckert dead.
But at a crucial point in the discussion, Patrick, a Movie Group member, said, “I just can’t believe that Fritz Lang made a film that wasn’t denouncing the Nazi’s.” Patrick is the one in the Group with an encyclopedic knowledge and memory for movies, movie makers and actors. He knows all about Fritz Lang and what he was about. He made his statement at just the right time; I was persuaded. Release of the film had actually been held up by the Nazi’s, who were suspicious that it would depict them in a bad light. The film never depicts the Nazi’s per se, but after considering Patrick’s statement, it became clear to me that that’s what the film was about.
The criminal element shown was exactly what Lang portrayed it as: the organized criminal element. There was no working class grouping displayed as such. Lang was portraying the Nazis as criminals, without explicitly saying so. That way he got by the censors. Lang was defending the State and the Rule of Law. There was no depiction of “people’s justice” as I had thought, just the depiction of “criminal’s justice” (i.e., the Nazis). At the end, when the State steps in and takes Beckert, it is the Rule of Law that Lang is defending in the film. As such, the film was a progressive and early exposure and denunciation of the Nazis. The Group was right and I was wrong.
The problem I brought to the table is that I don’t trust the State. The bourgeois State to me represents the defense of killing Travon Martin, Jordan Davis and myriad other African American and minority people. It represents the rich and powerful and drives the poor and working class people into jail, poverty and desperation. I don’t trust the police and I don’t trust the court system, whether it was in Germany in 1930 or in the United States in 2014. Therefore, I was against those elements of the film from the beginning. That distorted my view and brought my 21st Century American consciousness to a 1931 German film. Even though I know the history, I didn’t see what Lang was doing until it was shown me by the Movie Group.
So it’s a great film, which I knew anyway. The technique is absolutely amazing. In 1931, Lang uses voice-over techniques to transition from scene to scene in ways that are thoroughly modern; they were cutting edge then. He uses shots from all angles (above, below, from the floor, from directly overhead and everywhere else) to make his points and to keep the film lively and interesting. One shot, where he rapidly zooms in on a character, was breathtakingly difficult at the time because they had to manually keep the camera in focus. Also, the cameras in that period were so loud they had to be muffled to make “talkies.” That made the cameras unbelievable bulky and unmanageable. But Lang managed them with precision and brilliance. His use of silence was also innovative: several times in the film, he makes the film entirely silent and reminiscent of the recent silent films he and others had made.
So that’s my story of the film. I know some of my positions during the Movie Group disturbed the others in the Group. I had to go through that to find some real meaning in the film. Like life, I can’t do that by myself; I need help. I got it from my Movie Group!
Copyright Bruce E. Parry
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