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A murderous pedophile is among us. It could be anyone. An apparently normal man, unassuming and who goes unnoticed, with a quiet and monotonous life and who works a common job. Maybe we know him, we've talked or even laughed with him, and he seems like a person worthy of utmost trust and respect. It would be absurd to think him capable of such atrocities.
A Murderer is Among Us should have been the title of this masterpiece of German expressionism by one of the most avant-garde and innovative directors, Fritz Lang, who, to avoid offending Hitler's rising National Socialist Party in 1931, was forced to change the title to M (M as in Mörder, murderer), the Monster of Düsseldorf. The first sound feature film by the brilliant Austrian director, later emigrated to the USA, is astonishingly innovative and topical, absolutely essential for the development of a new film genre: the thriller. And not just for the decidedly avant-garde directing techniques of the time, such as the frequent use of long takes, the distinctive chiaroscuro photography and disturbing shadows, and the introduction of sound, but also for the topics tackled and the development of the plot and the police investigation, which anticipated by many years the most popular thriller "subgenre" of the last two decades: the "serial killer movie." In an era when the word profiler still had an unknown meaning, "M, the Monster of Düsseldorf," based on a true story, reveals to us a candid, lively script overflowing with freshness, and despite the film's subject being morbid and terribly uncomfortable, it is not devoid of a certain subtle humor. The word pedophile is never, however, mentioned, only implied.
The first part of the film focuses on police investigations, initially wrongly targeting the usual poor individuals, prostitutes, and petty criminals; then an investigator tries to give a psychological face to the killer. In him, a vague precursor of the present-day detective profiler can be discerned, who ventures a timid yet effective and precise psychological and sociological profile of the killer and analyzes the presumed nature and habits during a meeting of police officers and judicial authorities where citizens are referred to as the public, another absolutely unusual and modern term for the time. By the third murder, resentment grows within the underworld due to false accusations and brutal police raids, businesses go to ruin, and the presence of this monster benefits none of them. They then decide to organize in order to catch him with cunning and unorthodox methods, defying the competent authorities who investigate on their own with meticulousness and scrupulousness and unprecedented investigative solutions, but with little success; a bold and inconvenient novelty in Lang's film is the portrayal of brutal and coarse criminals as more courageous, efficient, and capable than the police. When Franz Becker, the monster, is captured after many vicissitudes and moments of Great Cinema, he is brought to a basement before a multitude of people, all criminals, women, and elderly, and terrorized with a popular summary trial, even with a democratic public defender. From this point on, Lang's film reveals all its sociological potential, in addition to the strongly anti-capital punishment message that the director wanted to convey, speaking through the defense lawyer trying to persuade the people's jury not to kill him but to hand him over to the police for a regular trial. Becker, in a shocking confession, will vent all his mortification and impotent anger with the tragic awareness of being a psychopath and will reveal his most human and defenseless side. The enraged and unmoved crowd will decide to execute him just as the police burst in to hand over the killer pedophile to the judge. "None of this will bring those girls back to life," a woman mutters at the end.
The scenes that many thriller specialist directors will take as paradigms are numerous and memorable, as is the protagonist, the Hungarian actor with monstrous skill Peter Lorre, whose perverse and hallucinatory expression contrasts with his chubby, childish face and expressive, sly eyes. It is precisely his face that always comes to mind when I read The Mummy by Conan Doyle: Peter Lorre would have been perfect for the role of the unsettling Egyptologist Edward Bellingham. The masterful and highly intense performance of Franz Becker trapped Lorre in a certain cliché, immortalizing him forever in this terrifying yet desperate character in his frightening and immense loneliness. Unforgettable when he looks at himself in the mirror, distorting his facial features to physically resemble a monster, the close-up of his shadow as he preys on a girl, and the one on his aghast face reflected in a window when his young prey points out that on the back of his coat there is the infamous mark M, chalked cleverly by a thief to better identify him to accomplices.
M is a seminal and scandalous work of fundamental importance that brings new substance and vigor to German expressionism, taking its emotive and suggestive stylistic solutions to extremes and perfectly adapting them to sound, an astounding effect for the time: the whistle tune by Franz Becker is the most thrilling example. Its extraordinary modernity is not only to be found in stylistic choices and artistic direction but also in its resemblance to today's crime stories that inevitably involve us all in problematic and delicate discussions like the issue of pedophilia; and we realize that today as back then, different positions on the subject have not changed at all, they remain the same as always.
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