He Can't Help Himself

 M (1931)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

I have a deep appreciation for Fritz Lang's "M," a German psychological suspense thriller that jangles your nerves and makes your heart skip a couple of beats. The fact that Peter Lorre, one of the most haunted and haunting faces in movies, appears in just a few scenes is extraordinary. More extraordinary is the fact that his character does not inform the film exactly - the victims' mothers, the murdered children and the mob of people at large do. 

Berlin is facing a monumental crisis - a psychopath is in the city and kidnapping and killing children. This is all presumed, the killing aspect that is, because the bodies of the children are never found and supposedly buried somewhere (or at least that is the implication). Wanted posters are placed in the town square yet the police are mystified and cannot find the child killer. Eventually, they discover the culprit but the mob of people in the area - some of them criminals and parents and there are business owners,  who feel their livelihood is being affected - gather together and decided to apprehend the killer. They fake being homeless street persons, and other just simply watch any individual passing a balloon or candy to any young child. A blind beggar is central to the identification of the killer who whistles Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King."   

"M" is chilling to the bone throughout especially in the depiction of the aftermath of a child's disappearance. Lang and his cinematographer, Fritz Arno Wagner ("Nosferatu"), show a montage of different settings such as the empty chair at the kitchen table, the long empty staircase leading to one child's apartment where the child should be running and skipping up to her home and, the most frightening symbolic shot of lost innocence, a balloon floating up in the air near power lines. 

"M" does contain too many scenes of the mob, mostly criminals, infiltrating an office building where bug-eyed Hans Beckert (Lorre), the deranged killer, is hiding out. Still, there is much to distinguish this stylish German noir with its askew shadows (especially of the wide high-angle shot of the street where Beckert is seen) and its police procedural point-of-view of detectives finding clues to the mystery killer. One striking shot in particular shows Beckert finding a chalk imprint of an M on his back coat - moments like this impart a nightmarish logic of being identified only as a murderer. Does Beckert have any sense of remorse or guilt? It is difficult to say but by the time we arrive at the unbelievably powerful confession given by Beckert, it is an admission where he knows he has committed such crimes yet he can't help himself. Lorre is so amazingly emotional in his fear of himself that he makes the other criminals of this mob see themselves and the crimes they have committed. A purposely abrupt ending where the mothers plead for others to keep watch of their own children while they await the killer's fate, Lang's "M" is probably more moral than any American film on the same subject. E for Excellence.