M

A madman stalks the streets of a German city, abducting little girls and murdering them. The citizens are hysterical. The police are helpless. The mob can't conduct its operations in the midst of the constant police crackdown—child murderers are bad for business. The mob chieftains make a momentous decision: they will use their underworld intelligence to find the killer, and deal with him in their own way. The police, the mob, and the public—themselves becoming a mob of a different sort—form a pincers as they search, with the killer caught in the middle...

Fritz Lang, who directed the silent 1926 science fiction classic Metropolis, here makes the move into sound with his greatest film, a chilling story of murder and revenge that has influenced countless films that have come since, up to this very day. Lang was one of the most important cinematic practitioners of German expressionism, a silent-era artistic movement characterized by deep shadows, distorted camera angles, and surrealistic set design (think The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari). M bridged the gap between German expressionism and the nascent genre of film noir, which kept the deep shadows and added morally ambiguous characters and a pessimistic view of the world. After fleeing Germany in 1932, Lang later moved to America, where he became one of the foremost directors of film noir during the genre's heyday in the 1940s. You can see many of the elements that came to define noir on display here.

This is a very scary movie, but the fear is inspired by what is unseen far more than anything that is seen: the murders are never depicted but are instead suggested by scenes that are at times heartbreaking in their iconism. M is in German with English subtitles.

Points to ponder:

• This was the first major film role for Peter Lorre, the bug-eyed, raspy-voiced actor who later starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon and is probably best known today for being parodied in countless Loony Tunes cartoons. The diminutive Austrian, who plays the child murderer Hans Beckert, went on to become a staple of the Gothic-style horror films that were popular in the 1930s and 1940s; while not physically imposing, his goggle-eyes and quiet line delivery combined with an undeniable sexual ambiguity made for a supremely unnerving experience for the audiences of the time. M is considered by many to be Lorre's finest work: he uses the dissonance between the monstrousness of Beckert's crimes and his unimpressive physical appearance to create an air of pathos that makes his scenes all the more disturbing. See if you agree.
• M is one of the earliest sound films still watched today, having been released less than four years after the first "talkie," The Jazz Singer. Sound films of that era tend to resemble silent films in they way they build tension and convey atmosphere and emotion, directors having not yet developed the conventions that have evolved over the past 60 years to govern the way sound is used in film today. Observe the differences between the way sound is used in M and the way it is used in films made today, or even films from the Wizard of Oz/Gone with the Wind/Casablanca era of just a few years later. Especially pay attention to Hans Beckert's whistling "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Grieg's Peer Gynt (you'll recognize it when you hear it; it, too, has featured in a lot of Loony Tunes cartoons). Some critics believe the whistling scenes are some of the most chilling in the history of movies.
• The working title for M was Morder Unter Uns: "Murderer(s) Among Us." Lang, a Jew, allegedly changed it because the Nazis, in ascendance at the time, thought the title referred to them and began threatening him. Lang fled Germany a year later—on the day Joseph Goebbels offered him a job making propaganda films for Hitler! Can you spot any allusions to Naziism in the film?