Fritz Lang's first sound movie, the serial-killer film M, has often been voted the best German film of all time, but, until now, most of us have never seen it properly. What we have seen is a heavily cut 1950s re-edit with extra sound and music patched in, where Lang was deliberately economical with the new technology. This new "Ultimate Edition" is dominated by a marvellous restoration which is true to his intentions and oft-voiced complaints about what had been done to his best film. The young Peter Lorre is terrifyingly ordinary as the child-murderer whom police... and criminals hunt down in what is still one of the best forensic police procedurals ever made, while Gustaf Grundgens has effortless charisma as the chief gangster. Lorre's Hollywood exile and decay, and Grundgens' betrayal of old friends and principles under the Nazis, merely add a layer of irony to all this. Lang's ironic cuts--a gangster's gesture is completed by his police equivalent--and dark, studio-bound cinematography make this one of the great precursors of American film noir. Simply, seen without cracks and pops and lines running down the screen, M is revealed as a true classic--a film that shames everything made in its genre since. On the DVD: M on disc has a great deal of documentary material featuring scholars and technicians telling us just how clever they have been in preparing this splendid restoration. The film also comes with a detailed commentary into which has been spliced interview material with Lang talking in English about specific sequences. There is a German-language film interview with Lang in which he talks through his career and re-enacts the interview with Goebbels that led to his exile; an audio interview with Peter Bogdanovich; and an intelligent video critical essay by film historian R Dixon Smith. The restored film is shown in its correct, unusual visual aspect ratio of 1.90:1 and has vivid cleaned-up digital mono sound: the murderer's whistling of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" has never sounded so chilling. --Roz Kaveney [show more]
Before Psycho or Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Before Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer and all the recent crop of serial killer direct-to-video stuff, there was M. In 1931 Fritz Lang made M, a movie loosely based on Peter Kurten, the Vampire Of Dusseldorf. Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) is a child killer on the loose in Germany who has baffled the police. In a public image move, the criminal underground has decided find him and get rid of him because he is making it harder for them to work with all the new police pressure. There are some really cool shots that go back and forth between the criminal element planning their hunt, and the police planning theirs. Eventually, the criminal underground catches him, by placing the titular "M" on his shoulder, marking him as the murderer, after which he is placed on "trial" and convicted. This is a genius piece of art and a pioneering talkie, AND the first talkie for Peter Lorre. Well worth a viewing, I was lucky enough to see this at a revival screening shortly after a remastering was done in 1997 that restored a few seconds of footage at the end of the film. Find it and watch it, they don't make them like this anymore... Peter Lorre proves his mettle as an actor in M, pouring forth pathos that had rarely been seen, especially in this early part of the era of the sound picture. His performance holds up still today as one of the great performances of all time. Det. Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) also puts forth a stellar effort in a role he would reprise later for Fritz Lang in The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse, another masterpiece. The edition to have of this fine film is the most recent Criterion Collection version, however this version is no slouch and for those who are unable or unwilling to purchase from the States, I would waste no time in picking this one up.
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