Rachel Bellwoar reviews M by Samm Deighan…
Fritz Lang’s M is a horror film. There are other genres that would happily claim M as one of their own, but they’re not the reason the film has a Devil’s Advocates monograph. Devil’s Advocates is a series that focuses on horror movies from Auteur Publishing. Other films that have gotten the monograph treatment include Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Suspiria.
Organized into five chapters, writer Samm Deighan begins by laying out what to expect in the introduction. Watching the film first is probably recommended but, if it’s been a while, Deighan’s synopsis is helpful for brushing the cobwebs away and remembering how the story played out, including some of Lang’s visuals, like how he suggests Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) has murdered Elsie Beckmann (Inge Landgut) by showing her ball rolling away and her balloon getting caught in some wires.
As Deighan discusses further in chapter two, M is a whydunnit, not a whodunnit, except Beckert doesn’t have a motive for his murders so much as a compulsion to kill (like the murderers in many of the films that came out of German expressionism, which Deighan explores in chapter one). Chapter three looks at the research Lang did into different cases, including the killers thought to have been Lang’s inspiration. While Lang asks viewers to sympathize with a serial killer, the real Beckert targeted mostly women, not children — a change that Lang made in the screenplay he co-wrote with Thea von Harbou that doesn’t do Beckert any favors, if murder is murder.
Both the police and Berlin’s criminal underground are looking for Beckert. They don’t know who he is, the way viewers do – just that someone has been murdering children in the city and that Elsie makes it eight so far – but both groups, despite being on opposite sides of the law, are determined to stop him.
The film, which came out in 1931, is Lang’s first sound picture. It also came out at a difficult time in Germany. WWI had ended (leaving many soldiers shell shocked, which Deighan finds an interesting way of connecting to M as well) and the Nazi’s would come into power a year after the film’s release. Deighan shows how M foreshadows their rise, particularly in regard to the police and how they use Beckert and the public’s fear as an excuse to grant themselves more latitude.
The criminals aren’t exactly looking for Beckert for the right reasons either and, despite being criminals themselves, Beckert is treated as an outsider. Lorre would go on to play many such outsiders and chapter five considers M‘s legacy and the films that have come out since where a serial killer is the lead.
For all that Beckert is othered, it’s his anonymity that makes people realize the killer could be anyone. Horror likes to hold up its supernatural, movie monsters but it’s human monsters, like M’s Beckert, that can be the most terrifying.
Rachel Bellwoar
