M (1931)

This article about M is my entry for the Classic Movie Blog Association (CMBA) Fall 2025 Blogathon: Early Shadows and Precode Horror, but in reality, the film is a long way from Hollywood. M is firmly rooted in its time and place: the Weimar Republic of Germany in the interwar period, a time when the country was still suffering from its defeat in World War I and its citizens were suffering from unemployment, poverty, and despair, all exacerbated by the worldwide Great Depression.

I had seen M before and knew that it was about a child murderer, but the opening sequence was still a bit unsettling. The film starts with a circle of children in an apartment courtyard playing a game that seems to be the German equivalent of duck-duck-goose. A young girl is chanting the rhyme, and its words are dark: “Just you wait, it won’t be long / The man in black will soon be here / With his cleaver’s blade so true / He’ll make mincemeat out of you!” To be honest, the game reminded me of Grimms’ fairy tales. The children aren't even aware of the import of their words, but the first adult character, a woman carrying her washing to a neighbor washerwoman, is upset by them. The woman is on an upper landing, and she leans over the railing to admonish the children about singing such an awful song. As soon as she’s gone from the balcony, the children start their game again, oblivious to the danger that the adults are already aware of and seem powerless to do anything about.

 

I use the term avant noir to describe films such as M that were released before the classic period of film noir (approximately 1940 to 1960) and that show at least some of the characteristics of classic noir. I am probably the only person who uses the term because proto-noir is used more often. The French term avant noir (“before noir”) is true to the French origins of classifying some film with the term film noir, which French writers started after the end of World War II.

 

The woman delivers the laundry to Mrs. Beckman, who is waiting for her daughter Elsie to come home from school. The children and the two women are in enclosed settings, and all of them seem restricted in their actions. The cuckoo clock in the washerwoman’s apartment seemed charming to me, but the next sound viewers hear is the tolling of a bell (I’m assuming it’s a church bell). It’s loud and insistent.

 

The film moves outside, to adults waiting for schoolchildren at a school's entrance. When Elsie Beckman steps out in the street and a driver honks a car horn, the sound is much louder. Elsie is helped by a police officer and then continues down the street. She stops briefly to throw her ball against a kiosk plastered with notices. One of them advertises a reward for the murderer, which Elsie pays no attention to, but it is given a close-up by the camera. She is interrupted by a man whose shadow falls in profile on the notice at the kiosk.

Mrs. Beckman gets more and more anxious because Elsie is late. Viewers know before her mother does that Elsie has disappeared and probably has been murdered. Her ball rolls on the ground into the camera frame. Her balloon, which the male stranger had purchased for her, is shown in a separate shot, where it is caught in overhead wires and freed by a strong breeze.

 

The narrative in this opening sequence seems to alternate between feeling safe and feeling threatened, which increases the tension slowly for viewers:

◊ The children playing (safe).

◊ The woman admonishing them (threatened).

◊ The conversation in the washerwoman’s apartment (safe). The adults waiting for the schoolchildren (safe again).

◊ The schoolgirl (Elsie Beckman) stepping out into traffic (threatened).

◊ The police officer right there to help her (safe).

◊ Elsie Beckman playing ball against the notice about the reward for information about the murderer (threatened).

◊ And, of course, the shadow of the man in the hat appearing over the words on the reward poster (more threatening still).

After the introductory sequence, the narrative switches to the hunt for the killer.

(This article about M contains spoilers.)

The murderer, who is already suspected in the killing of eight children, writes to the press because the police won’t publish his letter to them. He taunts the police and promises to continue his killing spree. The city’s residents are becoming more and more terrified. They are suspicious of their friends and of any man talking to young children. They make false accusations and attack people who are arrested for other crimes.

The police are under increasing pressure to find the murderer, but they have very few clues. Officers are fatigued by the increased workload. Their superiors are anxious for results because they deal with the public and the press. The constant police activity has also aggravated the public, even though people want the murderer caught. Criminals are harassed constantly by police officers looking for clues. All kinds of criminals are detained and arrested, but the murderer is still not found. The organized criminal syndicates in Berlin keep track of the police activity. They complain about the constant police presence and the lack of privacy.

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, husband and wife, wrote the film’s screenplay and based this information on the criminal syndicates in Germany’s Weimar Republic, which were called Ringvereine. Click here for more information at Wikipedia.

A more recent work that is also embedded in the Weimar Republic in Germany during the interwar period is the German television series Babylon Berlin. To see my article about the series, click here.

One of the criminals, Safecracker, leads a meeting of all division leaders of the city’s criminal enterprises. He tells them that an outsider is ruining their business and their reputation. They need to put an end to the constant police harassment, or they will continue to lose money. They want to find the murderer and kill him themselves, and they devise a plan to do that. They decide that the members of the beggars syndicate are in the best position to look for the murderer because they make their living by being out in public at all hours. No one will suspect them if they are on the lookout while they are on the streets begging for their livelihood.

Police leaders are also conducting a meeting to think of ways to find the murderer. But they want to arrest him and put him on trial, not kill him when they find him. One of the police leaders mentions that the murderer probably leads an ordinary life and gives the examples of Grossman and Haarmann (two real-life serial killers who had been caught in Germany). The murderer must be an ordinary citizen to keep getting away with his crimes the way he has. The police decide to investigate people who have recently been released from hospitals, insane asylums, and so on. They reason that he would seem like he was cured if he was otherwise so ordinary. With this new tack, the police eventually find Hans Beckert.

The cross-cutting between the police meeting and the criminal syndicate meeting shows that both groups are similar in many ways, but it also highlights their differences. The police have already spent eight months on the investigation by the time of both meetings. The criminals would be new to their task if they weren’t already experienced in finding fellow criminals to mete out their own forms of punishment.

The beggars find the murderer first. Hans Beckert spots another potential victim, and this time, his whistling of the same song he always whistles when he has found a child gives him away. A blind balloon seller heard the same whistled tune the day that Elsie Beckman disappeared, and he directs his friend Heinrich to follow the man whistling and walking with a child. Heinrich chalks his hand with the letter M and transfers it to the back of Beckert’s coat. The beggars are alerted and track Beckert using their own whistled signals.

The criminals, once again led by Safecracker, put Beckert on trial in a mock court. Beckert’s mock defense counsel says that Beckert deserves to live because he is a sick man, not an evil one. The criminals are not the ones to judge because of their criminal records. Safecracker, for example, is wanted on three counts of manslaughter. Beckert pleads his own case, too, by saying that he has no control over his urge to kill and therefore does not deserve to die for his crimes.

I found Beckert’s argument here a little disingenuous. He had written to the press because the police won’t publish his letter to them, and he promised to continue his crimes. He must therefore remember his crimes, not forget them, as he also claims.

The debate over Beckert’s punishment is a debate on both sides of the death penalty, which was apparently also debated in Germany at the time, when the country had to deal with several mass murderers. The criminals found the killer in the film, but they are prevented from killing him by the rule of law, which steps in at the last minute in the form of police officers arriving on scene.

The last shot in the film is of Mrs. Beckman sitting with other mothers mourning their murdered children. She addresses the camera, the viewers, directly: “This will not bring our children back. One has to keep closer watch over the children! All of you!” It seems to be a warning to everyone, not just parents, about watching out for their children. It's a compelling ending, but it doesn’t offer any more in the way of a solution to the problem of serial killers, which presents a slew of separate issues. And apparently it wasn’t the same wording in all versions of the film, and knowing that leaves the ending even more ambiguous.

I saw M twice on DVD. Both DVDs were published by The Criterion Collection, one in 1998 and the other in 2015. The subtitles, that is, the translation, was different for both versions, and I would like to give a shoutout to the translators. The choices they make when translating influence the story in subtle ways, and I find it interesting to see the different versions. The lines I quote are from the 2015 Criterion Collection version. In the case of M, it also seems that different versions of the film, with different translations for different foreign markets, were released for the film’s debut in 1931. Wikipedia offers an introductory discussion of this topic.

The two-DVD set published by The Criterion Collection (The Criterion Collection, 2015) includes commentary by Anton Kaes and Eric Rentschler. It is well worth a listen because both commentators provide many insights and lots of information about Fritz Lang, the director; the film’s production; and the influence of the period on the narrative. Here are just a few of the points made about the film in the commentary:

◊ M uses some film noir techniques: extreme high- and low-angle camera shots, harsh shadows, pools of lights, wet streets and pavement. M influenced American film noir of the 1940s and 1950s.

◊ Collective hysteria and mass contagion was generated by the media, specifically newspapers. Newspapers create sensational news to attract readers. People don’t like uncertainty, which exaggerates their fear when they hear a few more details in the news but no arrest of the murderer.

◊ Newspapers need new material for their daily headlines. Serial murder cases provide that material. There were 140 daily newspapers in Berlin at the time the film was produced.

◊ The story details are based on the real serial murderer Peter Kürten, the so-called vampire of Düsseldorf. Friedrich Haarmann was also an inspiration for Hans Beckert. Haarmann knew how to use the press for his own publicity.

◊ A culture of nervousness is emphasized through the excessive smoking and measuring time in seconds. This could match the type of nervousness that soldiers felt in the trenches of World War I.

◊ Lang shows an almost anthropological interest in the way the beggars live, work, and eat. There were 4.5 million beggars in Berlin at the time the film was produced. The beggars’ organization of themselves and their assignment to city sections to watch for the murderer previews how the Nazis would organize the state. It also mirrors the way that conscription was organized at first for Germany’s entry into World War I.

◊ Many of the beggars would have been World War I veterans. The character with a wooden leg is one example, and so are the blind beggars.

◊ Beckert suffers from trauma, maybe from service in World War I? He says that he is pursued by himself and cannot escape.

◊ Inspector Karl Lohmann is based on Ernst Gennat, then director of the Berlin criminal police. He modernized criminal and homicide investigation in Berlin. He was also interested in the effects of serial killing on the community, how the murderer’s mental illness and actions infect the community and begin to drive community members mad in a metaphorical and perhaps literal way. Gennat was a consultant for the Kürten case and wrote several articles about police procedure for a trade publication.

Ernst Gennat is also one of the main characters in Babylon Berlin, again based on the real-life director of the Berlin Criminal Police Department. In the television series, the character uses the real-life name. In the film M, he goes by the name Inspector Karl Lohmann. You can find more information about Gennat at Wikipedia by clicking here.

One of the most striking features of M is the use of silence. While watching the film, I sometimes wondered if my speakers stopped working. Even when sound was used, it was minimal, which made various scenes almost claustrophobic. Another striking feature is the sequence about the mock trial conducted by the criminals. Hans Beckert, Peter Lorre’s character, accuses all the criminals of committing crimes themselves, and he pleads for his life because he maintains that he cannot help what he does. The dialogue exchange between Beckert, his defense attorney, and Safecracker in that scene makes the case for and against the death penalty.

Peter Lorre is superb as Hans Beckert in M. His portrayal of Beckert’s anguish and terror at being who he is is just amazing, and his performance made him a star. The film and its story are amazing, too. Lang and von Harbou created the story based on life in Germany at the time, so the film is also a fascinating look at German society in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

This article about M is my entry for the CMBA Fall 2025 Blogathon: Early Shadows and Precode Horror, hosted by the Classic Movie Blog Association (CMBA), from November 10 to November 14, 2025. Click here to see the list of participants and their contributions. The list will be updated each day of the blogathon.

May 11, 1931, release date  •  Directed by Fritz Lang  •  Screenplay by Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou  •  Edited by Paul Folkenberg  •  Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner

Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert  •  Otto Wernicke as Inspector Karl Lohmann  •  Gustaf Gründgens as Der Schränker (Safecracker)  •  Ellen Widmann as Mother Beckmann  •  Inge Landgut as Elsie Beckmann  •  Theodor Loos as Inspector Groeber  •  Friedrich Gnaß as Franz, the burglar  •  Fritz Odemar as Falschspieler (cheater, cardsharp)  •  Paul Kemp as Taschendieb (pickpocket with seven watches)  •  Theo Lingen as Bauernfänger (con man)  •  Rudolf Blümner as Beckert’s mock defense counsel  •  Georg John as the blind balloon seller  •  Carl Balhaus as Heinrich Leeser  •  Franz Stein as minister  •  Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur as the police chief  •  Gerhard Bienert as criminal secretary  •  Karl Platen as Damowitz, a night watchman  •  Rosa Valetti as the owner of the Crocodile Club  •  Hertha von Walther as a prostitute  •  Hanna Maron as young girl playing the game at the beginning  •  Heinrich Gotho as passer-by who tells a child the time  •  Klaus Pohl as witness/one-eyed man

Distributed by Nero-Film A.G.  •  Produced by Vereinigte Star-Film GmbH

Revoir Paris (2022): “A Diamond in Trauma”

I loved Revoir Paris. I must confess, however, that I have never heard anyone describe it as a noir. It does contain elements that are common to noir, going all the way back to its beginnings in the 1940s: murder, amnesia, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These noir elements happen in a very different setting for Revoir Paris, a very modern one: a mass shooting. I decided to write about the film because it captures the noir feature of PTSD so well. And it is a great film.

This article about Revoir Paris contains many spoilers. It also discusses a film whose plot could be triggering for people suffering from PTSD. The director Alice Winocour based her fictional story on the experiences of her brother, who survived the November 2015 attacks in France when he was attending a concert at the Bataclan theater in Paris. Viewers will have to make their own decisions about seeing the film, but it is meant to be an homage to the human capacity to survive. Sara, a character in the film, a trauma survivor, and the organizer of a support group, tells Mia Loreau, another trauma survivor and the main character of Revoir Paris, that “a diamond in trauma” is a way to come to terms with tragedy and horror. In the midst of all the pain and suffering, there is still something good, something to hope for.

The film starts with a slow dolly of the camera toward the open door of a balcony in a Paris apartment. Mia Loreau waters plants on the balcony and then crosses the threshold to enter the apartment. The camera continues zooming in on the scene outside the balcony door, leaving everything about the apartment building behind and showcasing the neighborhood. Like the film’s title, it lets viewers know that Paris is as much a character in the story as the actors. In the kitchen, Mia gets ready for work as a Russian translator. Her partner, Vincent, a doctor, does the same. The day starts just as any other for them.

After work, Mia and Vincent go out for dinner. Vincent takes a phone call, and he returns to the table to tell Mia that he must go back to work. Mia is left to finish her meal on her own. She doesn’t return to her apartment right away because it starts pouring rain while she is driving her motorcycle home. To wait out the thunderstorm, she stops at L’Étoile d’Or for a drink. The brasserie is crowded, and she is seated at a table in a back room. Mia has a glass of wine and does some journal writing. Her fountain pen starts leaking, and she has to go to the restroom to wash her hands. She notices other patrons around her, in the restroom and in the dining room, including a man celebrating his birthday at a nearby table with a group of friends. He catches her eye. All these details become important later, when Mia’s memory comes back in pieces, and she must come to terms with her recovery.

Mia gets up to leave the restaurant and allows two other patrons to proceed before her. As they near the front door of the brasserie, the man and the woman are shot dead. Mia drops to the floor and tries to hide. From this spot, she can see the assassin enter the brasserie and methodically shoot random patrons, really anyone who is still moving. She plays dead to escape being shot, and when the assassin moves to another room in the brasserie, Mia starts crawling.

And then the screen goes black.

After a few seconds, the screen is filled with an overhead shot of La Place de la République at night. Viewers can see the streets coming together at this monument and traffic making its way around the traffic circle surrounding it. It is unclear at first whether Mia is still alive, but then her voice on the soundtrack explains that she cannot remember anything past the point when the screen goes black, when she is crawling on the floor of the brasserie. She continues talking over the shot of La Place de la République, which is another way to showcase the city of Paris. The film is about thirteen minutes long at this point, and the rest of it is devoted to Mia’s recovery and that of other survivors.

Mia is physically scarred from her injuries in the shooting. She tells her plastic surgeon that she wants to get her reconstructive surgery over with so that she can move on, but the surgeon tells her that they have to wait because a procedure now risks infection. During their brief conversation, Mia reveals that she is back in Paris for the first time after spending three months at her mother’s home recuperating. On her way home from the surgeon’s, Mia’s bus takes a chance detour past L’Étoile d’Or, and Mia disembarks to visit the brasserie. Perhaps she is ready to recapture her lost memories.

Mia’s friends and her partner Vincent don’t know what to say to her. They wonder when she will get back to her old self. In the meantime, she has flashbacks. Sometimes she sees the patrons from L’Étoile d’Or: they are silent, but they appear as though they are part of her life. Mia tells Vincent that people used to confide in her; now they hold back. They don’t know what to say. She tells Vincent that he treats her differently now, too, since the night of the shooting. It’s as if he is trying to be careful around her. Vincent insists that Mia is wrong, that what she says is not true, but she says that, yes, it is true.

Mia asks Vincent about the details of their dinner the evening of the shooting. Was it raining or not? He was called away to work, yes? What time was that? She wants to rebuild her memories, but it’s not a project that interests Vincent much. Viewers learn later that it’s not only the understandable gaps in his memory that makes him reticent. He is having an affair with a coworker, which was the reason for his leaving his dinner with Mia in the first place.

When Mia gets off the bus and stops at L’Étoile d’Or for the first time since the shooting, she learns about a trauma support group and meets other survivors of the same night. One is Thomas, who caught Mia’s eye the night of the shooting. He tells Mia that he remembers everything about that night. She eventually reaches out to him to help her. He is not so sure that remembering everything is such a good idea, but he tells her, “You can’t do it alone. It takes two or more to remember.”

Mia meets several other survivors, and all of them experience the pain of tragedy in their own way. Each one has a unique way of coping, and when I started listing their unique coping mechanisms, I began to think of them as the quirks of trauma. Here are a few examples:

◊ Mia takes a seat during her first trauma support group meeting at L’Étoile d’Or, and another attendee, Félicia, asks her to move because it is the same table where her parents were sitting when they were shot and killed. Later in the film, Félicia learns that her parents were in the middle of writing a postcard addressed to her, a postcard of the painting Water Lilies by Claude Monet, when they were killed. Félicia wants to see the original painting, one of the last things that her parents saw when they visited an art museum on the day that they died. She says that it will be “like saying goodbye to them.” Félicia cannot part with anyone unless she is on good terms with them because she knows now that anything can happen.

◊ Thomas is now claustrophobic. He cannot enter L’Étoile d’Or and thus cannot attend the trauma support group meetings. He connects with Mia by motioning to her from his position on the sidewalk outside the brasserie so that she can join him. He also suffers from survivor’s guilt. On the night of the shooting, he was at L’Étoile d’Or celebrating his birthday with coworkers. Two did not survive the shooting.

◊ Another survivor, Camille, confronts Mia and accuses her of saving only herself. Camille says that Mia had the chance to help others by letting them into the bathroom where she had locked herself in, but she did nothing. Later in the film, Camille finally admits to Mia that it was she herself who locked everyone out of the bathroom. She had constructed her own memories of that night because she had just lost her husband in the shooting and was so overpowered by grief that she couldn’t process what was happening to her.

◊ Some of Mia’s memories come back in the form of dreams, when she is asleep. Sometimes they flash before her while she is going about her daily life. Félicia tells Mia that sometimes she thinks that she sees her parents walking on the streets of Paris. Mia understands because she sees some of the victims, too, even though she knew no one in the brasserie the night of the shooting.

Mia’s relationship with her partner Vincent becomes more and more complicated the more she searches for a way to recover and come to terms with what she experienced. She moves out of their apartment into that of a friend’s near La Place de la République. She comes home one night to find Vincent waiting for her at her front door. He tells her that he doesn’t understand what she’s doing, why she won’t come home to the apartment that they share. He offers simplistic explanations: He thinks that she has found someone new or that she would rather be with her support group. He starts packing her things without her consent. Mia tells Vincent that he cannot help her, that she cannot go back to their old life. Vincent asks, “I have to watch you go crazy and do nothing?” He does not understand her feelings or what she is going through, and he does not understand that there is nothing that he can do.

When Mia meets Vincent again in the apartment they shared for a final goodbye, he tells her that she shouldn’t associate the shooting with him and that she wouldn’t leave him if they had had a child together. She tells him that it wouldn’t have changed anything. It was a decision that they had both made, and she doesn’t regret it. When they leave in his car, she asks him directly where he was the night of the shooting. Vincent admits that he was meeting someone that he is having an affair with. Mia and Vincent’s separation may have been inevitable, and Mia’s trauma perhaps hastened it.

Memories slowly come back to Mia, and her persistence, determination, and research pay off. She begins to recall that she hid in a closet with a young man, a chef at L’Étoile d’Or, who held her hand and reassured her. Her search for clues is a rather unconventional detective story, and it could be called another noir feature. The man that Mia is searching for is Assane, an illegal immigrant, which makes tracking him down very difficult. To find him, Mia must enter a world that is very much a part of Paris, but it wasn’t a part of Mia’s life before the shooting. Not many people in this world are willing to talk, but Mia finally gets answers from an employee who stayed employed at the brasserie after the shooting and from a handler who helps immigrants find work. Assane was a chef at the brasserie and happened to be looking for food ingredients in the basement when the shooting started. That chance event saved his life, but many of his friends died that night.

Mia finally finds Assane selling souvenirs near the Eiffel Tower. At first, he pretends that he doesn’t recognize her, but then he admits that he was the one who held her hand. They are happy to find out that both survived and are continuing with their lives. The meeting gives Mia, especially, a sense of closure. She and many of the other survivors feel a need to connect with the people they spent such harrowing moments with. Many offered comfort at a time when they feared for their lives.

The film is realistic in its treatment of recovery after trauma. The pace and timing were true to the subject, which is not often comfortable for survivors or those who care about them—or for viewers of a film. Some reviewers of the film did not like the long pauses, with the camera resting on characters’ faces and their portrayals of emotion, and the slow pace of the action. But the film does not have any fast action; it is not that type of film.

Virginie Efira, in the role of Mia Loreau, carries the film, and her performance is powerful. The actors in supporting roles also give great performances. I saw the film several times, and I was lost in the narrative every time.

The opening and closing credits appear in neon-blue type over a black background, which matches the blue tinge of Paris at night, when Mia often searches for peace and answers. The emphasis on the blue lights of the city works well, as does the soundtrack and sound design. The music is an original score that emphasizes the mood and pace of the narrative.

The DVD that I watched came with features that included interviews with the director, Alice Winocour, and the two lead actors, Virginie Efira and Benoît Magimel. All the features are worth a look to learn more about their creative processes and their approach to creating the story.

As I mentioned earlier, Winocour, based her fictional story on the experiences of her brother, who survived the November 2015 attacks in France when he was at the Bataclan theater in Paris. For more information about the November 2015 attacks in France and about the film, click on the links in the following list:

◊ Wikipedia: general information about the November 2015attacks in France.

◊ Moveable Fest: an interview with Winocour about the film.  

◊ Film Review Daily: a review of Revoir Paris.  

The English-language title for Revoir Paris is Paris Memories, a title that makes the film sound like a love story, a romantic comedy, and it is anything but. The French title literally means To Resee Paris. And I can understand that the literal translation might not have worked very well. Mia Loreau is indeed searching for her memories of a traumatic event, but I might have gone with something like Searching for Memories in Paris.

Revoir Paris captures the reality of life for Mia after she experiences a mass shooting. In her particular case, one could say that she might not have been living her life to the fullest before the trauma because it is only afterward that she faces some hard facts. For instance, she finally has the courage to confront her live-in boyfriend about his affair with one of his coworkers.

I hope Alice Winocour revisits the topic of Revoir Paris and creates another film about tragedy and PTSD. Maybe the topic deserves many films exploring the path to recovery, which takes a lot longer than the time frame suggested in Revoir Paris. I don’t think it was Winocour’s intent to suggest that such horror could be examined and resolved in a few months or in one film. So I do hope that she returns to the subject. I think that she would do great justice to the long-term effects of tragedy and PTSD.

May 21, 2022 (Cannes); September 7, 2022 (France); June 23 2023 (United States) release dates  •  Directed by Alice Winocour  •  Screenplay by Alice Winocour, Jean-Stéphane Bron, Marcia Romano  •  Original music by Anna Von Haussewolff  •  Edited by Julien Lacheray  •  Cinematography by Stéphane Fontaine

Virginie Efira as Mia Loreau  •  Benoît Magimel as Thomas  •  Grégoire Colin as Vincent  •  Maya Sansa as Sara  •  Amadou Mbow as Assane  •  Nastya Golubeva Carax as Félicia  •  Anne-Lise Heimburger as Camille  •  Sokem (aka Kemso) Ringuet as Hakim  •  Sofia Lesaffre as Nour  •  Dolores Chaplin as Estelle, Thomas’s wife  •  Clarisse Makundul Kyé as Essé  •  Zakaviya Gouran as the plastic surgeon  •  Johathan Turnbull as the waiter at L’Étoile d’Or

Distributed by Pathé  •  Produced by Dharamsala, Darius Films, Pathé, France 3 Cinéma

The Tattooed Stranger (1950)

I am adding a new one to my list of film noir favorites: The Tattooed Stranger. For a film that is just a little bit more than an hour long, The Tattooed Stranger packs in a lot of information and entertainment. And if you like history as much as I do, it is also a visual record of New York City as it was in the middle of the twentieth century. I have seen the film several times and found more to like each time. Everything about it is low budget and minimalist, and it all works in its favor.

The film starts with a man walking his dog through Central Park in New York City. The dog leads him to a parked car, and the man is shocked to find a deceased female in the passenger seat. The man rushes to the driver’s side of the car and honks the car horn, which alerts a police officer on horseback. It isn’t long before other officers arrive and surround the vehicle. They question the witness, and homicide detectives and the medical coroner are called to the scene.

The crime scene has a few clues. The car was stolen in the Bronx and reported by the car’s owner. The detectives take fingerprints, a cast of a footprint, samples of all the materials (dirt, grass, vegetation) that they find in the car. However, the woman is a Jane Doe. There is nothing on her person or in her purse to identify her.

Captain Lundquist assigns the case to Lieutenant Corrigan and pairs him with new homicide detective, Frank Tobin. Lundquist is impressed with Tobin: He has a college education and a good war record; he was a military police officer in the army. Lieutenant Corrigan is still a little worried about working with Tobin; he jokes with the captain that his grammar might be too poor to measure up.

Tobin is transferring from his work in the police crime lab, and he is convinced he will miss the work. His boss, Captain Gavin says that they will still be working together on cases but that Tobin shouldn’t put all his faith in modern (1950) criminal science: “Now, look, Tobin, you hang around this place too long and you begin to think that the answer to everything can be found on a microscope slide and spectrograph reading. Oh, those things help. Science can help a lot. But remember, 90 percent of an investigation is still carried on in the inside of a man’s head and the bottom of his feet.”

The medical examiner had already examined the body of Jane Doe when he leaves the examining room, and his completed examination is a lucky break because a man enters and tries to carve up her body. A foot chase ensues inside police headquarters, and the intruder is eventually shot and killed. Lieutenant Corrigan recognizes him: Billy Alcohol, already known to the police because he is always being picked up for public drunkenness. The detectives learn that Billy Alcohol was hired to attack the dead body, and the medical examiner can figure out why. Jane Doe had a tattoo on her wrist, and it is an important clue in a case that has so few.

(This article about The Tattooed Stranger contains spoilers.)

Another important clue is a plant specimen found at the crime scene that Captain Gavin cannot identify. He and Captain Lundquist send Detective Tobin to the Museum of Natural History for some research about it. Lieutenant Corrigan is off to inquire at different restaurants to see if he can find where Jane Doe worked because the medical examiner guessed that she spent most of her days on her feet.

At the Museum of Natural History, Detective Tobin meets Dr. Mary Mahan. He is surprised to learn that the PhD plant specialist is a woman. (It helps to remember that the film was released in 1950, when women were leaving the workforce and giving up jobs for returning service members.) They identify the plant, but Dr. Mahan remembers that additional research on the plant was done at the Botanical Garden. She and Detective Tobin head there next to learn that the unknown plant sample found at the crime scene was once found in a vacant lot on the south corner of Gun Hill Road and Grand Boulevard (in the Bronx, according to my online search; no one says so specifically in the film). These scenes serve another purpose: Detective Tobin and Dr. Mahan are attracted to one another and thus provide a bit of romantic interest in the film—no femme fatale for this film noir.

Lieutenant Corrigan distracts Detective Tobin from his budding romance because he wants Tobin to join him for a tour of what he calls “art galleries,” that is, tattoo parlors, on the Bowery. They need to show the photo they have of Jane Doe’s tattoo to tattoo artists in the hope of finding the artist and perhaps learning the victim’s identity. They finally find Johnny Marseille, who tells the detectives that he recognizes the tattoo. He also recognizes the woman from the photo they have of her dead body on the examiner’s table. He doesn’t know her name, but he remembers that she came with a man, a regular customer named Al Radditz. They got matching tattoos at the time, which he thought was romantic. She came in maybe a year later to have the tattoo altered, which is the one in their photo. Johnny Marseille and the detectives surmise that she and Al Radditz broke up and she found a new boyfriend.

From this point on, the two detectives, Tobin and Corrigan, follow the clues and put in the footwork to solve the case. The work is painstaking, and they follow one detail after another, which means the plot goes from one point to another. Once again, I have to point out that The Tattooed Stranger, like so many films noir, needs careful attention to detail. And it’s easy to miss something. It also helps to do a little bit of research because the film includes many cultural references that film viewers in 1950 would have known and taken for granted. Here are just a few examples of what I mean:

◊ Lieutenant Corrigan gives Detective Frank Tobin the nickname “Luther Burbank” after Captain Gavin sends Tobin to the Museum of Natural History to investigate the plant specimen that cannot be identified. I had no idea who Luther Burbank was and had to look up his name to learn something about him. Luther Burbank (1849–1926) was a U.S. botanist, horticulturist, and agricultural scientist—and he had his own active website! Click here if you want to learn more about him at his own webpage at that site.

◊ Detective Tobin tells Dr. Mahan that his homicide case is in the news, but he is joking. When she asks for proof, he directs her to a comic strip in the newspaper. Dr. Mahan tells Tobin that she will feel like Tess Trueheart if he stands her up for their dinner date. Tess Trueheart was a name I thought was associated with the comic strip Dick Tracy, but it was still a name I had to look up, just to be sure. Tess Trueheart was indeed the girlfriend of Dick Tracy, famous cartoon detective of the Dick Tracy comic strip created by Chester Gould in 1931. Click here for more information at Wikipedia about the list of characters, including Tess Trueheart, in the Dick Tracy universe.

◊ Tobin starts a running gag with Lieutenant Corrigan at the beginning of their murder investigation with the following crack: “I knew a tattooed WAC once.” WAC stands for Women’s Army Corps, created during World War II. The Tattooed Stranger was released in 1950, only five years after the end of the war, and it’s a good bet that U.S. film viewers were intimately familiar with all the nation’s defense forces. Click here to learn more about the WAC at the National WWII Museum.

The running gag about the tattooed WAC is one example of the humor in the film. There is a lot of good-natured fun and comradery among all the police officers and detectives. The humor keeps the homicide investigation from getting too burdensome, for the characters and the viewers!

The on-location shooting in New York City is spectacular. The investigation takes the detectives to Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx; they certainly cover a lot of territory. The film has inadvertently become a great historical film record of New York City in 1950, now seventy-five years ago. (One thing that surprised me a bit was the amount of litter in the streets. The city was not especially clean seventy-five years ago.)

One of the pleasures of seeing the film several times was my increasing appreciation for Walter Kinsella’s portrayal of Lieutenant Corrigan and his relationship with Detective Tobin. Because of these two detectives, The Tattooed Stranger was a buddy cop film before the term was invented. The two share most of the jokes, and they trade mock insults and one-liners with each other. It is obvious that the two characters, the two actors (Walter Kinsella and John Miles), enjoyed working together on this film. They managed to trek all over Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx on a short production schedule and on a tight budget. They even tour tattoo parlors on the Bowery back when it was a neighborhood populated by people who had problems with alcohol and public drunkenness.

And they have fun doing it, which means fun for viewers, too.

February 9, 1950 (premiere in New York City), March 11, 1950, release dates  •  Directed by Edward Montagne  •  Screenplay by Philip H. Reisman Jr.  •  Music by Alan Shulman  •  Edited by David Cooper  •  Cinematography by William O. Steiner

John Miles as Detective Frank Tobin  •  Patricia Barry as Dr. Mary Mahan  •  Walter Kinsella as Lieutenant Corrigan  •  Frank Tweddell as Captain Lundquist (aka Lundy)  •  Rod McLennan as Captain Gavin  •  Henry Lasko as Joe Canko  •  Arhtur L. Jarrett as Johnny Marseille  •  Jim Boles as Fisher  •  William Gibberson as Aberfoyle  •  Jack Lord as Detective Deke Del Vecchio

Distributed by RKO Radio Pictures Inc.  •  Produced by RKO Pathé Inc.