Saturday Night Cinema
M

Tonight’s feature is the classic film, “M”.

This film is nothing less than a masterpiece.
It is a highly structured and stylized film about a serial killer.

It created the serial killer genre, which includes such entries as Psycho and Silence of the Lambs.

Alfred Hitchcock (the director of Psycho) was a disciple of Lang, as were Jacques Tourneur (The M1
Leopard Man (1943)) and Michael Powell (Peeping Tom (1960)).

M was not only the originator of the genre, but arguably remains it preeminent entry.
Highly recommended for those in the mood for a Hitchcockian-style thriller with a great performance by Peter Lorre and great story-telling technique by Fritz Lang.

This week’s unimaginable evil calls this movie to mind. CLICK HERE OR BELOW TO WATCH MOVIE.

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M – Eine Stadt sucht einen Moerder (1931)

The roots of noir go back to German Expressionism, and there’s no movie that’s more German, Expressionist, or noir than Fritz Lang’s masterful — and finally restored — M
(1931). While this story of the pursuit of a child-killer lacks one of
the crucial elements of the genre, the femme fatale, the other
components of noir are here in force. There’s the dark cityscape, an
unstable environment in which children play in the street singing
chants about “black bogeymen” and murderers. There’s the paranoid
pathology of the individual in the person of the twisted Hans Beckert
(Peter Lorre), who courts and kills his young victims for reasons he
can’t express or fathom, and a frenzied mob that brings its own brand
of justice against him. Many of the classic noirs of the 1940s and
later owe a debt to M’s obsessive attention to the details of
the manhunt, with the most minute aspects of police procedure rendered.
Most important, though, is the sense of doom that colors the film, a
fatalism Lang renders through chiaroscuro lighting effects and enormous
high-angle shots that suggest a malevolent spiritual presence hovering
above the city and guiding its denizens to their doom.

M
is based on the real-life case of child-killer Peter Kurten, the
“monster of Dusseldorf,” whose crimes of the 1920s were still recent
enough to resonate in the viewer’s mind. The film is divided into three
distinct sections. In the first, Lang introduces killer, victim, and
the desolate urban landscape in which the crimes occur. The style here
is oblique and impressionistic — shots of a blind man selling balloons,
a little girl taking the hand of a stranger, a ball rolling down a
hillside and coming ominously to rest. The director’s discreet
rendering of the murder of Elsie Beckmann subtly implicates the viewer
in what is not shown — as Lang wrote, “forcing each individual
member of the audience to create the gruesome details of the murder
according to his personal imagination.” Typical of the powerful
sensibility at work here is a shot of the balloon Beckert purchased for
Elsie, a crudely formed clown; separated from her hand during one of
the film’s unseen “gruesome details,” it ends up helplessly trapped by
telephone wires.

[….]
It’s generally agreed that M was critical in hastening Lang’s departure from Germany in 1934. The Nazis weren’t thrilled by the film’s original title, Murderers Among Us;
they assumed it was about them and tried to squash the production, even
going so far as issuing death threats. Of course, in a sense they were
correct. M is about more than the landscape of an unbalanced
mind. With its palpable air of dread and its direct indictment of mob
mentality, the film draws with frightening precision the dark contours
of Nazi groupthink.

Click below to view the film

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