M
Peter Lorre is a child murderer in Fritz Lang’s first talkie. Kids have either gone missing or turned up dead and it’s giving the legitimate criminals a bad name and making life difficult because of that huge numbers of police on the streets. The the criminals decide to catch the killer on their own. It’s interesting to watch the way the criminals do it v. the way the police do it. The criminals hire the beggars union (who knew there was such a thing?) to watch every street and alley in the city until a likely suspect pops up. The police try deduction and sleuthing. They both arrive at the same conclusion at about the same time. It’s an interesting exploration of relative justice.
Peter Lorre is masterful as the pitiful killer, Beckert. He’s really, really creepy. I mean really creepy and not in a Frankenstein way. It’s more of a I-could-live-next-to-that-guy, Mr.-Everyman-is-a-psycho kind of way. The ending is left open, so you don’t really know what they final outcome of the case is, but it’s interesting to listen to the criminals bemoan the fact that it’s so easy to get off by claiming diminished mental capacity (or the German equivalent).
The film is stylistic and cleverly shot, it suffers just a nudge from a sort of silent film emotive acting in spots. I have never seen so much smoking in a movie. My only complaint is technical. The movie is in German and is black and white which means it’s subtitled. Why can’t they put the subtitles in yellow? White lettering on a starkly black and white film is really hard to see.
Rating: B; would watch again.
