M (1931): Fritz Lang and the First Serial-Killer Film

Watch enough crime films and you start to feel the whole genre bending back toward one point of origin, the way iron filings arrange themselves around a magnet you cannot see. That point is a chalk letter pressed onto the shoulder of a coat in Berlin, 1931. Fritz Lang’s M is the film where the serial killer stopped being a penny-dreadful bogeyman and became a case — a man to be hunted, catalogued, profiled and, most unsettlingly of all, understood. Everything that followed, from the wall of index cards to the psychiatrist explaining the childhood, is downstream of ninety-nine minutes Lang made at the exact moment German cinema was learning to talk.

The film that had to be about sound

M was Lang’s first sound picture, and he treated the new technology as a subject rather than a garnish. Consider what the medium had just done to horror and crime: the silents built dread out of shadow and the intertitle, and here was a director who realised that sound could hide as much as it revealed. The killer, Hans Beckert, arrives by his whistle long before his face — a few bars of Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, worried and tuneless, floating out of a doorway or over a shopfront while the frame stays empty. Lang lets the melody do the work a monster’s silhouette used to do. When Beckert is agitated the whistling speeds up; when a blind balloon-seller later recognises that tune, sound becomes the clue that closes the net. A visual film could not have built its whole detection engine on a man’s nervous habit. Lang understood that within his first year of talkies, and most directors spent the next decade catching up.

There is a famous stretch early on where a mother calls her daughter’s name up an empty stairwell while the camera shows us the girl’s abandoned place at the table, her ball rolling out from a patch of grass, her balloon snagged in telephone wires. Lang withholds the murder entirely. We are given the aftermath as pure sound and absence, and it is more devastating than anything he could have staged. That restraint is the film’s moral spine. It refuses the pleasure of the kill.

Two machines hunting the same man

The structural stroke that makes M feel modern is that it runs two investigations in parallel and cross-cuts between them until they rhyme. The police, under mounting public panic, tighten the city with raids and paperwork; every dragnet lands on the ordinary criminal underworld, and the pressure is strangling business. So the crooks — pickpockets, safecrackers, the whole guild of organised crime — decide to catch the killer themselves, because he is bad for trade. Lang stages meetings of the police brass and meetings of the criminal syndicate in matching compositions, the same fug of cigar smoke, the same men leaning over the same maps, and the editing dares you to tell the two rooms apart. Law and lawlessness converge on identical methods because both are institutions defending their turf.

That idea — the cop and the criminal as mirror professionals — is one of the most fertile in all of crime cinema, and you can trace a clean line from M to the diner across from a diner in Michael Mann. The Heat two-hander is Lang’s cross-cut logic slowed to a single conversation. Beckert being run to ground by the very underworld he has terrorised also anticipates the way later procedurals turn the hunt itself into the drama, the cost of the obsession becoming the real subject the way it does in Zodiac.

Peter Lorre and the trap of sympathy

The film would be a brilliant machine and nothing more without Peter Lorre, in his first major role, doing something no crime film had asked an actor to do. For most of M Beckert is a smudge of guilt at the edge of frame — a sweating profile in a mirror, a hand, that whistle. Then the underworld catches him and drags him before a kangaroo court in a derelict distillery, an audience of thieves and murderers who want him dead, and Lang gives Lorre the floor. What comes out is not a plea for mercy. Beckert describes being driven, hunted from inside by an urge he cannot govern, pursued through the streets by his own compulsion the way the police pursue him through theirs. He points at the assembled professional criminals and tells them the difference between them: they chose their trade.

It is one of the most dangerous scenes ever filmed, because it works. Lorre makes you feel the terror of the man and you hate yourself a little for it. Lang is not excusing the killer; he is refusing to let the audience off the hook of comprehension. The whole apparatus of the modern serial-killer film — the profiler crawling inside the murderer’s head, the interview through the glass — is an attempt to reproduce the vertigo of that distillery scene. When The Silence of the Lambs puts Clarice on one side of the bars and asks us to find Lecter magnetic, it is cashing a cheque Lorre wrote in 1931. So does the whole clammy business of getting inside the killer’s routine in Manhunter.

Why it still works

The craft holds up because Lang built the film out of principles rather than effects. The camera is patient and geometric; he composes Berlin as a trap of stairwells, courtyards and shop windows, a city that watches itself, so that when Beckert is finally marked he is caught inside an architecture that was always closing. The letter M itself — chalked on the palm of a pursuer and pressed onto Beckert’s shoulder in a mock-friendly clap — is the purest suspense device imaginable, because now the killer is branded and does not know it, and Lang can wring an entire chase out of a man trying to see his own back.

Then there is the ending, which I will hold for the spoiler line, except to say that Lang was too intelligent to give a panicking public the catharsis it wanted. M stares straight at the question of what a society should do with the man it has caught, and declines to make anyone comfortable. The film is often shelved as an antique, admired the way you admire a cathedral, and that undersells how raw it plays. It is faster, stranger and more morally slippery than most crime films made ninety years later.

Where to see it: M has been beautifully restored and lives on the Criterion release; the full-length version runs close to two hours and is the one to seek out, since older prints circulated badly cut. If it sends you looking for the ancestors of the modern hunt, the grubby moral weather of Touch of Evil and the unsolved-case ache of Memories of Murder are the two branches of the family tree that lead straight back here.

Spoilers below

The distillery trial is the reason M endures, and it turns on a single reversal. The criminals have appointed a defence counsel for Beckert, a drunk who nonetheless argues, with real force, that a man who cannot control his compulsion cannot be held to account the way a thief who chose his crimes can. The mob howls this down; they want blood. And at the very moment they close in to tear him apart, the real police burst in and arrest the lot of them. Lang cuts away before the verdict.

The final scene is a court of law — the legitimate one this time — and three grieving mothers in black. A voice, one of the mothers, says that no sentence will bring the children back, and that we must all keep closer watch on our children. Lang ends on the faces of the bereaved rather than on judgement or execution. He deliberately withholds the punishment the entire film has been straining toward, because the film’s real question was never will they catch him but what does catching him actually fix. The answer is nothing. The children are dead; another compulsion will find another city.

That refusal is the radical act. A lesser film hangs the monster and rolls credits on a cleansed community. M leaves you in a room full of mothers who have been promised nothing, having just watched a killer nearly saved by a criminal court and then handed to a legal one whose verdict Lang won’t even show you, because the verdict is beside the point. The horror is that the compulsion is real, the grief is real, and the machinery of justice — whether run by police or by thieves — cannot reach either. Ninety years of crime cinema has been circling that hole in the middle of the frame ever since.