The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

INTRODUCTION

In an ordinary Berlin street in 1931, a child is playing. From the shadows nearby, a haunting melody is whistled by a murderer.

The talkies had already made their entrance four years earlier, but this, perhaps, is the moment in cinema when the sound era truly begins. The movie was M, a dark thriller by German director Fritz Lang. In that single scene, Lang went far beyond simply adding sound to movies. He was playing with sound, using it. He was making it a character’s signature.

Early sound

The first years of sound were a disruptive time for the industry. Many stars lost their careers when they failed the voice test, and there were times when the new technology made the movies so cumbersome to produce that some might have been better left silent. Yet the technical troubles were overcome, new stars emerged, and the magic returned. Even today, there are many for whom movies will never again equal those made in the 1930s and 1940s, the height of the classical Hollywood period. It was an era when, for all the trauma of world events—not least the Great Depression and World War II—movies had swagger, confidence, and mass appeal. They were glamorous and escapist. And they made their audiences laugh. While Charlie Chaplin never fully took to sound (Buster Keaton even less so), others were perfect for it. The Marx Brothers’ verbal virtuosity had their audiences in stitches, while the very essence of screwball comedy was the wisecracking one-liner.

"We are not trying to entertain the critics. I’ll take my chances with the public."

Walt Disney

Monster spectacles

While M is a good place to open this new era, classical Hollywood’s symbol could be King Kong (1933). This monumental movie spectacular was proof of the studios’ willingness to make movies ever larger in their quest for excitement. Kong joined a monster hall of fame. Universal Studios had already made the iconic horror movies Frankenstein and Dracula (both 1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Invisible Man (1933), all popular entertainments that also exhibited some brilliant filmmaking.

King Kong was big, but it didn’t have a monopoly on scale. By 1939, audiences were being wowed by The Wizard of Oz (its yellow-brick road seen in saturated Technicolor) and roused by Gone With the Wind, an epic romance set against the historical backdrop of the American Civil War.

In Europe, however, another war was about to start. By the end of the 1930s the Nazis’ brutal rule had a major impact on the industry. Scores of directors and actors, among them some of Europe’s most talented, had defected to Hollywood.

A postwar edge

World War II gave the movies that came after it a new, abrasive edge. Even Britain’s typically sweet-centered Ealing comedies acquired a darker tone when Alec Guinness played multiple roles in the murder story Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). Darker still was writer Graham Greene’s peerless web of intrigue and betrayal in postwar Vienna, The Third Man (1949).

In the US, crime drama evolved into a new genre—film noir. Its swirl of stylized shadow play borrowed heavily from the German Expressionists of the 1920s, its femmes fatales and world-weary gumshoes becoming some of cinema’s defining figures.

From Italy came a different kind of downbeat. In the Rome of 1948, director Vittorio De Sica used a cast of real people to tell a tale of everyday struggle called The Bicycle Thief. It was the type of movie that lit a fuse in all who saw it. But perhaps the most influential movie of the era had already been made. An ambitious portrait of a press baron, 1941’s Citizen Kane goes in and out of favor with critics, but its impact was immense. Its cowriter, producer, director, and star, Orson Welles, was 25 when he made it. As it would be again in the next decade, movies had been reshaped by young people too much in love with its possibilities to be hampered by the past.

IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Crime drama

DIRECTOR

Fritz Lang

WRITERS

Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou

STARS

Peter Lorre, Otto Wernicke, Gustaf Gründgens

BEFORE

1927 Metropolis, Lang’s seminal science-fiction epic, is groundbreaking for the scale of its futuristic vision.

AFTER

1935 Karl Freund, who was the cinematographer on Metropolis, directs Mad Love, a Hollywood horror starring the by now famous Peter Lorre.

1963 In the last movie he makes, Lang appears in front of the camera, playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le mépris (Contempt).

Classic old movies as influential as Fritz Lang’s M—without which there would have been no Psycho, Silence of the Lambs, or Se7en—can be slightly disappointing when viewers finally come to see them. By then the movies will have been so emulated and borrowed from that they can end up looking somewhat hackneyed. Not so with M—Lang’s crime masterpiece still bristles with chilling invention.

The real-life crimes of Peter Kürten, known in the press as the Vampire of Düsseldorf, were fresh in the minds of German audiences when M was released in May 1931. Lang later denied that Kürten was the inspiration for his script. Although he was clearly tapping into a theme that was sitting high in the public consciousness, his portrayal of a murderer was far from predictable.

The first surprise was in the casting. Little-known Hungarian actor Peter Lorre, a small man with bulging, oddly innocent eyes, seemed an unlikely choice to play a child killer. The next surprise was in the movie’s oblique narrative. While concerned with justice, M is not a simple tale of crime and punishment, and defies expectations from the outset.

The movie’s iconic poster displays the “M” (for murderer) that will be imprinted on the killer’s back so that he can be trailed.

Shots of absence

The movie’s opening murder is set up with a heartbreaking poignancy: as Beckert, who is seen only in silhouette, approaches a young girl at a fairground, the scene cuts to her anxious mother at home, then out of the window, then into the yard. Her calls become desperate over shots of absence: vacant rooms, an empty dinner plate. When the actual murder is committed, Lang shows nothing but the girl’s ball rolling into the grass and a stray balloon floating away.

Beckert, the killer, seen only from behind, writes to the papers, protesting that the police are not publicizing his crimes. Instead of trailing Beckert, however, Lang cuts to the wider repercussions of the girl’s murder. A reward is posted, and as the police pursue their investigations, the citizens plan their own justice. Vigilantism, a common theme in Lang’s later career, becomes a major element of the story.

"The tangled mind is exposed… hatred of itself and despair jumping at you from the jelly."

Graham Greene

A human monster

Part of the power of M is the way in which Lang effortlessly wrong-foots the viewer. So meek is the monster at the heart of the story, when his face is finally revealed, that the audience is thrown off guard, put into his shoes and made to feel his fear. Lang then expertly cranks up the tension, with the killer unwittingly marked with a chalk letter “M,” for Mörder (murderer), and Beckert’s distress increasing as the chase gathers momentum.

M was Lang’s first “talkie,” and he makes incredible use of sound, and silence. The director subtly creates tension in the killer’s very first entrance: as he is about to strike, Beckert whistles a familiar tune—to unsettling effect. Lang uses sound to different but equally disturbing ends when Beckert is on the run, when the noise of fire-engine sirens and traffic create a disorienting cacophony.

The killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) stares wide-eyed at his back, as he sees in the mirror that he has been marked with the letter “M.”

Final judgment

M keeps nudging the audience off balance to the end. The movie’s tension comes not only from the relentless ticktock of the narrative, but also from the question that Lang asks the audience: what kind of justice it wants to see for the killer. It’s a sophisticated approach even now, let alone for an audience that would still have been acclimatizing to Lang’s innovations with sound and subject matter. Lang himself—in a long career filled with truly great movies—always insisted that M was the finest of them all.

Born in Vienna in 1890, Fritz Lang made his directorial debut at the German UFA studios with Halbblut (The Weakling) in 1919, about a man ruined by his love for a woman—a recurrent theme in his movies. After a series of hits, including science-fiction classic Metropolis, Lang made his masterpiece with M. Impressed by his talent, the Nazis asked Lang to head the UFA studio in 1933. Instead, he fled to the US, where he forged a highly successful career. He died in 1976.

1922 Dr. Mabuse the Gambler

1927 Metropolis

1931 M

1953 The Big Heat

What else to watch: Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922) ✵ Metropolis (1927) ✵ Fury (1936) ✵ Ministry of Fear (1944) ✵ The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) ✵ The Big Heat (1953) ✵ While the City