M
With Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Grundgens, Ellen Widman, Inge Landgut, Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur, Franz Stein, and Theodor Loos.
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Lang himself correctly maintained to the end of his life that M was his best film–not so much for its formal beauty as for the social analysis that its form articulates. (In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Contempt–another restoration that will open at the Music Box a month from now, in which Fritz Lang plays himself–this point is underlined when he first meets Brigitte Bardot’s character, who expresses enthusiasm for his western Rancho Notorious; Lang graciously replies, “I prefer M.”) He also, according to film historian and programmer David Overbey (who knew him during his last years), tended to change the subject or grouse whenever the name Orson Welles came up. It’s an understandable reaction; in spite of all the pages wasted on the alleged influence of Stagecoach or The Power and the Glory on Citizen Kane, M is clearly–visibly and audibly–the major predecessor of that movie’s low and high angles, its baroque and shadowy compositions, its supple and wide-ranging camera movements, its tricky sound and dialogue transitions, and above all its special rhythmic capacity to tell a “detective story” by turning most of its characters into members of a chorus, delineating a social milieu and penetrating a dark mystery at the same time. (Welles claimed never to have seen any of Lang’s German work when he started making movies, and many of his stylistic moves surely emerged from his theater and radio work. But it would be difficult to look at Citizen Kane again without thinking of M repeatedly.)
In keeping with the collectivist spirit of the early 30s, social organization and narrative organization work hand in hand here; they even become indistinguishable insofar as organizing a manhunt is what the city and the story both do. In an early sequence a taunting letter from the murderer to a city newspaper is published, and we move straight from the letter in the paper to a state minister (Franz Stein) reading it while arguing over the phone with the chief of police (Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur), who’s seen in separate shots. As the police chief describes his department’s investigation, his voice turns into narration over a striking montage illustrating his various points. One of these points takes us to police headquarters, where a detective is questioning two irate, competing witnesses–each a vivid character sketch–about whether the bonnet worn by a potential murder victim that morning was red or green; a crisply edited comic interlude concludes with one witness snapping, “Of course, inspector, if you’re willing to listen to a socialist…”–one of many details missing from most previous versions of M.
Part of the awesome effect of this sequence derives from the fact that it’s the only truly extended sequence in the film, as well as the only one that depends entirely on spatial and temporal continuity. Until this point the film leaps back and forth across the city, from one smoke-filled room or crowded or empty street scene to another–showing how similar cops and crooks can be while planning their strategies or charting their separate interactions with the beggars, the community, or each other. The oratorical hand gesture begun by Schranker (Gustaf Grundgens), head of the underworld, at one strategy meeting where he says, “I’m appealing to you…” is completed by the police chief at another strategy meeting, where he says, “for advice.” The point of making this continuity cut isn’t to imply that the crooks and cops are identical, but to point out that they’re similar in certain respects, even to the point of having common interests. It’s an analysis that brilliantly serves triple duty by traversing the city and advancing the plot at the same time.
In a universe ruled by video and cyberspace, where such assumptions can no longer be entertained or even easily imagined, the terror remains, but not the mission to see the world whole. (Lang took a halfhearted stab at this in his last film–The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, which involves former Nazis and video surveillance and was made back in Germany in 1960–but hardly anyone was interested at the time.) Maybe we’ll have real stories like M again, and better ways of telling them, once we’ve rediscovered more precisely what it is that we’re missing.
