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 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