M (1931)

Look, I'll be straight with you: M is nearly a hundred years old, and the fact that it still works as well as it does is genuinely remarkable. Fritz Lang was doing things with a camera and an editing table that must have been an absolute nightmare to pull off when you consider cinema itself was only a few decades old at that point. There are sequences here that feel modern in the best possible sense, which is either a tribute to how ahead of its time this film was, or a sign of how much the language of filmmaking owes to it. Probably both.

The setup is grim and compelling. A child killer is terrorising a city, and the pressure mounts from two very different directions at once. The police are bearing down, flooding the streets with investigations and checkpoints. But the criminal underworld is equally motivated to catch the man, and for reasons that have nothing to do with justice: all the extra police activity is killing their business, and the flood of false reports from a panicked public is clogging everything up. It's a brilliantly cynical piece of storytelling, that idea of a city closing in on one man from angles that have almost nothing to do with morality. Both sides want him caught. Neither side particularly cares why they want it.

The moment the film earns its title, the "M" itself, is the clear highlight for me. It's inventive, tense, and genuinely clever in a way that feels fresh even now. I won't spell it out for anyone who hasn't seen it, but it's the kind of detail that sticks with you. Everything in the film is building toward that, and when it arrives, it lands. The parallel structure between the police investigation and the criminals' own manhunt is handled with real confidence, cutting between the two camps as they each lay their plans. Seeing organised crime operate with almost bureaucratic efficiency is darkly funny and surprisingly engaging.

If you've seen Little Caesar (1931), which came out the same year, you get a sense of just how much early sound cinema was wrestling with questions of crime, law, and who actually keeps order in a city. M asks those questions in a far more uncomfortable way, partly because the thing everyone is hunting is so genuinely monstrous.

But I do have to be honest about the middle section, because it drags. The script is bloated in places, and there are stretches where the film loses its grip and I found myself genuinely fighting to stay with it. That's not a small thing. A film can have all the craft and historical significance in the world, and if it's sending you to sleep somewhere around the hour mark, that matters. The pacing feels uneven, like the film is confident about its beginning and its ending but slightly uncertain what to do in between.

So where does that leave me? Three stars feels right. I have enormous respect for what M achieves and what it must have taken to make it. The camerawork, the editing, the sheer ambition of it all at that point in cinema's history is staggering. The concept is strong, the best moments are genuinely great, and Peter Lorre's performance is unsettling in a way that's hard to shake. But respect and enjoyment aren't the same thing, and I can't pretend it didn't test my patience. A flawed watch, then, but one absolutely worth your time if you're even remotely interested in where modern crime and thriller filmmaking came from.

Three stars.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1931  | Watched: 2025-06-22

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Fritz Lang: You Only Live Once (1937)
More with Peter Lorre: Mad Love (1935) · The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
More from Germany: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Cemetery Man (1994) · The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) · Resident Evil: Retribution (2012)
More from the 1930s: Earth (1930) · Monkey Business (1931) · Sabotage (1936) · People on Sunday (1930)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More thriller: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Angst (1983) · The Long Walk (2025) · Punishment Park (1971)