"M" (1931)

Starring: Peter Lorre, Ellen Widmann, Inge Landgut

First, the Lowdown: A child killer in Germany finds himself running from both the law and the German underworld.

I always thought that Peter Lorre was creepy, but it's nothing compared to seeing him speak his native language. Lorre plays Hans Beckert, a quiet and unassuming man who has a penchant for killing little girls. When the film opens a schoolgirl, Else, is lured from her daily route home by Beckert, who plies her with candy and toys and then takes her to an empty lot to kill her. (The scene is really subtle here: the girls death is implied by her rubber ball rolling free.)

Lorre plays the role of a predatory killer very realistically. His mannerisms show a man who is very socially awkward and probably can only bring himself to comfortably interact with children. Lorre is perfectly benign until he kills, had we not been introduced to Beckert's murderous nature, we would have thought of him more as a victim of mistaken identity than anything else. Is inconspicuousness aside, hearing Beckert whistling Hall Of The Mountain King from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt suite is guaranteed to raise the heebie-jeebie levels in your system.

Else's murder is highly publicized and sends the citizens of Berlin into a fever of panic. Beckert's letters to the daily news only add fuel to the public hysteria, and soon average citizens are accusing each other of the brutal crime. The police are overwhelmed from the intense pressure put upon them by both the Minister and the public at large.

Acting on the suspicion that the killer is hiding in the lower quarters that house much of Berlin's underworld, the police initiate daily raids to flush him out. The raids, however, do nothing to expose their quarry and everything to anger the underworld.

Sickened by the repeated raids, and the dent to their business that happens in their wake, the crime gangs organize with the intent of finding Beckert on his own. To achieve this, they enlist in the beggar's guild, who can watch the streets unnoticed. While on patrol, a blind peddler hears Beckert whistling Mountain King"in the distance, and has him followed by a young man. Upon seeing Beckert with a young girl, their suspicions are confirmed so to make Beckert easy to track, the man puts chalk mark of the letter "M" (for Mörder, or murderer) on Beckert's back.

A chase ensues, with the criminal underground coming out of the proverbial woodwork to close in on their prey. Once he realizes that he's been caught and that he's being followed, Beckert become more and more animalistic. The expression of fear is akin to a fox fleeing the hounds. (Lorre's bizarrely spaced eyes are used to their full effect in this sequence.) As he's being pursued, you can't help but sympathize with Beckert and begin hoping that he'll be taken in by the police as treated with an even hand rather than the unrestrained wrath of an increasingly agitated group of hooligans.

One interesting thing to note is that M was released just one year prior to Adolf Hitler's rise to power and was made during a time where the Nazi party was gaining much support and sympathy from the German public. (Who were also growing ever more hysterical under the weight of the German economic collapse.) In the following years Goebbels would use Lorre (who was Jewish) in his role as Beckert as an example of the degenerate nature of the Jews.

Line of the movies: "Who knows what it's like to be me?"

Five stars. Not verified by the FDA.