M (1951): The Remake

This 1951 version of M is a remake of the 1931 German film starring Peter Lorre, and David Wayne was brave to take on a role that made Lorre famous. But he does a good job of playing the lead, a child murderer named Martin Harrow. The male leads are not the only reasons to make comparisons.

The 1931 version very effectively portrayed a man tormented by his demons and who had been hospitalized before his killing spree. It also portrayed the arguments for and against capital punishment, which were debated in Germany at the time the film was produced, in much more detail compared to the remake. In contrast to the original film, which did not mention any police brutality, the 1951 remake depicts a Los Angeles police detective willing to use violence to get what he needs from suspects. The only check on this detective in the 1951 film is his superior, who has to keep reminding his subordinate not to go overboard.

The 1931 film was set in Berlin in the interwar period, between World Wars I and II. The 1951 remake is set in the now-demolished neighborhood of Bunker Hill in Los Angeles. Both films use their locations to orient the narratives in very specific ways. The 1931 film also relies on current events to fill out background information, which gives the film a lot more coherence, although this isn’t always obvious to U.S. audiences today. It’s hard to compete with a film that made Peter Lorre a star, and Lorre isn’t the only reason for that.

The 1951 remake of M is available free online. Click here to see it at the Internet Archive. Click here to see my article about the original 1931 film, and click here to read about Jim Dawson’s book about the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The 1951 film starts with two women approaching and then boarding the Angel’s Flight car in the neighborhood of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles. Bundles of newspapers are piled at the end of the small platform, all with the headline “Child Killer Sought.” Another man dressed in a suit and white fedora runs and jumps onto the car. As the car pulls away, the man in the suit leans forward into the opening of the car and looks out at the view of Los Angeles spread out below the hills.

The opening credits appear over various shots of young children who have been abducted and killed. (1) A young girl at a vending machine is approached by the man from the Angel’s Flight car, the one in the suit. (I noticed that the candy machine includes modern-day candy bars: Butterfinger, Hershey’s, and Baby Ruth! Me? A sweet tooth?) (2) The man then goes to an amusement park and helps a young girl at a water fountain. (3)  Then he watches a young girl drawing with chalk on a sidewalk. (4) Next, he stands on the boardwalk at a beach and watches a young girl there take off her shoes so she can play in the sand. After she runs onto the beach, he picks up her shoes.

The narrative starts after the credits with the man in the suit, Martin Harrow, getting his shoes shined and watching, from inside the shop window, two children cross the street toward the storefront. He gets up as they get closer. He spots Elsie Coster, his fifth murder victim, who crosses the street while bouncing a ball. The man goes outside and picks up the ball when it gets away from her, then takes her hand and offers to lead her home.

The girl’s mother, Mrs. Coster, sets a table for lunch in a small apartment. The film cuts abruptly to a screaming mannequin at an amusement park (it is the same mannequin from Woman on the Run), which is very jarring and very effective because viewers are expecting something bad to happen at any moment, but they are not expecting a screaming mannequin. Harrow and Elsie approach a blind balloon seller, and Harrow buys a ballon for the girl. Then he whistles and plays a pipe. The pipe seems to be a link to Harrow’s mood and inclination to kill, although the reasons for this are not entirely clear.

Mrs. Coster becomes frantic when Elsie doesn’t come home with her two neighbors, the first two children who crossed the street in front of the shoeshine shop. Viewers know that Elsie came to harm when her balloon floats into the sky over some tenements in Bunker Hill and when her ball rolls into a pile of trash.

This cutting back and forth between Mrs. Coster waiting for her daughter to come home for lunch and Martin Harrow selecting Elsie Coster as his next victim follows the 1931 original very closely. Most of the remake is remarkably similar in structure and narrative form, but there are some important differences. For instance, the abrupt cut to the screaming mannequin creates a sudden burst of tension, but the original 1931 film is more effective at building the tension of its story at a steady pace.

(This article about M, the 1951 remake, contains spoilers.)

I already mentioned that one of the Los Angeles detectives, Lieutenant Becker, favors violence to get what he wants from suspects. Police brutality is not a feature of the original German film, and viewers don’t see Lieutenant Becker put any of his ideas into action, but that’s because his superior, Inspector Carney, is always there to remind him of citizens’ rights. Becker mentions his proclivities so often that I wondered what he would do if Inspector Carney weren’t around to keep him in check. At one point during their investigation into the murders, Inspector Carney says to Becker that the killer could be a professor, a storekeeper, and with a pointed look at Becker, “maybe even a cop.”

When the police conduct one of their many raids on known sites of illegal activity in Bunker Hill, Lieutenant Becker says that he can shut everyone up so that they can conduct their interviews. Inspector Carney warns him to take it easy. Later, when the police consult a psychologist about recent releases of psychiatric patients who could be potential murder suspects, Becker is not happy with the interviewing methods and testing used by the psychologist:

• Inspector Carney: “You got a better way?”

• Lieutenant Becker: “Yeah. A dark room and a rubber hose and about a half dozen cops.”

• Inspector Carney: “The courts don’t like it that way.”

• Lieutenant Becker: “Yeah, that’s just the trouble. We need less courts and more cops. . . .”

This is one feature of the remake that resonates today, but for different reasons.

Inspector Carney is definitely the more philosophical of the two. When he finds Police Chief Regan being pressured by the mayor to find a suspect and resolve the case, he says, “The ordinary murder, you look for a dame or a bank book. Got a victim with no enemies. . . . What are we looking for? A man with a twisted mind. Could be anybody.” This same dilemma came up in the original film, too: No one seemed to know what kind of criminal they were looking for.

Jim Backus plays the role of the mayor in the remake, and his performance made his one big scene seem like comic relief. I don’t think this can be blamed on modern viewers, myself included, who know Backus’s starring role in the 1960s sitcom Gilligan’s Island. I don’t know if it was the filmmakers’ intentions, but the shift in tone was jarring in a film about the police pursuit of a child murderer. In the original, there never was such a break in the seriousness of the subject matter, and the consistency in tone worked much better.

The original 1931 film also spent more time than the 1951 remake on the pros and cons of capital punishment. Both Hans Beckert, Peter Lorre’s character, and his mock defense counsel at the trial staged by the criminal elements of Berlin near the end of the film discuss why Beckert should not have to face the death penalty. Beckert cannot be held accountable for his actions if he is insane and therefore not criminally liable. But in the remake, Inspector Carney only alludes to this issue. When he reports what he and Lieutenant Becker found at Harrow’s apartment to Chief Regan, he says:

• Inspector Carney: “. . . We’ll pick him up, but then what? Back to the booby hatch? Man like Harrow should never have been released in the first place. Hospitals so understaffed, they free dangerous men.”

• Police Chief Regan: “Well, he won’t get out this time. He’ll burn.”

• Inspector Carney: “That’s right, [more loudly as Police Chief Regan leaves his office] That’s right. [to himself, with doubt in his voice] That’ll fix everything.”

Another issue I couldn’t help noticing in the remake was the lack of search warrants. Lieutenant Becker poses as a health department official to talk to Harrow at his boarding house. Harrow isn’t home, but the landlady allows Becker to wait in Harrow’s room, and Becker does a search of the room while he is waiting. Becker doesn’t produce a search warrant for the landlady, but even if he had one, he has already claimed to be a health department official, not a police officer. He doesn’t find anything related to the murder case in his initial search, but when he and Inspector Carney return to Harrow’s room later to conduct another search, they eventually find Harrow’s stash of children’s shoes hidden in his closet. This search yielded evidence, but would it have been admissible without a search warrant in 1950s Los Angeles?

I wish that I could have found this film on a DVD that came with audio commentary. I would have loved to hear some historical context in relation to both the Bunker Hill neighborhood and police practices. I enjoyed the film more than I thought I would, but it is no match for the 1931 original. Maybe that’s partly because I saw it first, but the original treated its subject matter with the right level of seriousness and kept this tone throughout. I bet the remake could have deleted the mayor’s character altogether!

March 1951 release date  •  Directed by Joseph Losey  •  Screenplay by Norman Reilly Raine, Leo Katcher, Waldo Salt  •  Remake of M (1931), starring Peter Lorre, directed by Fritz Lang  •  Music by Michel Michelet  •  Edited by Edward Mann  •  Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo

David Wayne as Martin W. Harrow  •  Howard Da Silva as Inspector Carney  •  Luther Adler as Dan Langley  •  Martin Gabel as Charlie Marshall  •  Steve Brodie as Police Lieutenant Becker  •  Raymond Burr as Pottsy  •  Glenn Anders as Riggert  •  Karen Morley as Mrs. Coster  •  Norman Lloyd as Sutro  •  John Miljan as the blind balloon vender  •  Walter Burke as MacMahan  •  Roy Engel as Police Chief Regan  •  Benny Burt as Jansen  •  Leonard Bremen as Lemke  •  Jim Backus as the mayor  •  Janine Perreau as the last little girl  •  Frances Karath as the little girl in the hallway  •  Robin Fletcher as Elsie Coster  •  Bernard Szold as the Bradbury Building security guard  •  Jorja Curtright as Mrs. Stewart  •  William Schallert as the last Rorschach test taker

Distributed by Columbia Pictures  •  Produced by Superior Pictures

The Lost One (Der Verlorene) (1951)

It’s hard not to make comparisons between The Lost One, a film cowritten and directed by Peter Lorre and one in which he also stars, and M (1931), one of Lorre’s first film appearances twenty years earlier. Both films were produced in Germany, the first before Lorre’s escape from Nazi Germany and the second on his return to the country after Germany’s defeat at the end of World War II. Lorre’s performance in each film is spectacular in very different ways, but there are overlaps in theme and subject matter that seemed especially obvious to me because I saw The Lost One for the first time just a few weeks after seeing M.

You can see The Lost One free online. Click here to see it at the Internet Archive. The link gives you the option of seeing the film with and without English subtitles. I saw the film on DVD and at the archive, and the print at the archive is crisp compared to the DVD version. Click here to read my blog article about M.

In both films, Lorre plays a murderer, and both characters (that is, the murderers) make claims about not being able to rein in their murderous impulses. In M, it is implied that World War I had such a traumatic effect on both soldiers and civilians that it unleashed antisocial behaviors. (This point is brought up in the commentary provided on the DVD.) In The Lost One, all the characters are struggling to cope with wartime destruction and then the aftermath in the postwar period following World War II. Both films are bleak in their subject matter and in their portrayal of the human condition.

The Lost One includes a disclaimer stating that it is based on factual reports from the last few years (prior to 1951). It is what is known as a rubble film, a film produced on location amid the rubble left behind after the end of World War II. It was filmed in postwar Hamburg, Germany, and the war’s destruction is noticeable in almost every shot. The war still hangs heavy over German society after the end of the war. Much of the extended flashbacks feature the bombed-out city. The present of the film takes place in a refugee camp for people displaced by the war.

The narrative starts in the postwar period, when an attendant working in the Elbe-Duvenstett refugee camp meets Dr. Rothe and tells him that someone named Novak is waiting to meet him and to assist with dispensing vaccines for the newly arrived camp inhabitants. The attendant tells Rothe that Novak is a chemist from Katowitz. He has experience and can also help Rothe with his patient workload. Rothe is in the clinic to administer vaccines when Novak shows up. He and Rothe recognize one another immediately. Rothe is visibly upset, upset enough to get up, leave the clinic, and head to the railroad tracks.

After continuing his work in the clinic, Novak arrives to what he thinks is Rothe’s empty office. He helps himself to a drink and is startled when Rothe lights a cigarette in the dark. They share a past that neither wants to talk about, at least not right away. Both want to be sure that the other will keep their secrets. Novak tells Rothe that Winkler shot himself in the head. Rothe says that that leaves just the two of them: Novak and Rothe. Novak admits that he is on the run and needs identification papers. When they run out of alcohol in the doctor’s office, Rothe suggests that they move to the camp canteen, where they can eat and drink.

At this point, viewers are in the dark about the secrets that Rothe and Novak share, and they do not know who Winkler is or how he figures in their shared past. Rothe changed his name after the war to Dr. Neumeister and assumed a new identity. He already has identification papers. Novak’s name during the war was Hösch, and he needs identification papers to flee Germany.

Rothe and Novak continue their conversation when they arrive at the camp canteen, and Rothe says that everything changed for them on December 8, 1943. The mention of this date prompts the first of several long flashbacks that tell the story Rothe has been avoiding for years. Novak would rather avoid it, too, but unlike Rothe, he is barely perturbed by the past or his current situation. He is confident, even arrogant, about his role in his shared history with Rothe. He is also convinced that Rothe can be easily blackmailed and would never do anything to harm him. He even tells Rothe at one point that he is an amateur and that he could never pick up a gun and shoot him, even though Novak knows that Rothe has the gun that Novak once carried when he was still a member of the Gestapo. He needs identification papers to escape Germany and any postwar prosecution, and he is also confident that Rothe will help him escape.

(This article about The Lost One all the spoilers.)

The extended series of flashbacks reveals that Rothe and Novak’s shared dark past suggests they are not really all that different, even though Rothe was (and still is) a respected doctor and researcher developing vaccines and antibiotics, and Novak was a Gestapo agent working undercover in Rothe’s laboratory during the war. Viewers can infer that Novak is now a wanted war criminal. Inge Hermann, Rothe’s fiancé, sold his research secrets to the Allies in London via her father in Stockholm. Rothe learns about this from Colonel Winkler and Novak, and Novak learned of it by sleeping with Hermann and gaining her trust. When Winkler and Novak broke the news to Rothe, he was overcome by two betrayals: Hermann’s and Novak’s. The date is December 8, 1943, and Rothe eventually strangles Hermann later that day. Winkler and Novak cover up the crime by calling it a suicide.

Rothe tells Novak that Hermann confessed to the affair but not to the leak of his medical research to the Allies. She attempted a reconciliation with him, but he couldn’t go through with it when Novak called on the telephone. His intrusion into the discussion between Rothe and Hermann seems to have been the catalyst that pushes Rothe over the edge and prompts his first murder.

It was hard to tell if Rothe resented Novak’s intrusion only or if he feared what Novak would do if Hermann had been allowed to live indefinitely. Novak did say that he was willing to confront Hermann himself about the research secrets, but he didn’t say explicitly if part of his mission was to kill her. It is also hard to tell if Rothe feared any repercussions from the German state because of his own carelessness. It is possible that he was worried about all these factors. Once he kills Hermann, however, he continued his research, and Novak continued working at the institute alongside him.

But the burden of living with his actions eventually becomes too burdensome for Rothe. He goes through Novak’s desk at the institute looking for a cigarette, a small step that leads to one disaster after another. In addition to cigarettes, Rothe finds Inge Hermann’s letters to Novak; he also finds Novak’s gun. He burns the letters and then decides to kill both Colonel Winkler and Novak. His search for Novak leads him to Winkler’s house because he suspects Novak of being there when he cannot find him at work or at his own home. By chance, he comes upon a secret assassination plot to kill Adolf Hitler. He overhears other Nazi officers arriving at Winkler’s home and giving the password “Babylon.” He uses it to enter and eavesdrops on the officers discussing some details of the assassination attempt.

But Novak had followed Rothe to Winkler’s home. He knew that his gun was missing and was sure that Rothe had taken it after finding the burned letters. Novak arrives at Winkler’s home where he learns of the plot himself, but he doesn’t show himself to Rothe or anyone else in the home. He calls in other Gestapo agents, and the plot is foiled. Colonel Winkler escapes and returns Novak’s gun to Rothe. His last words are instructions to kill Novak.

Novak admits now, in the canteen at the refugee camp, that he lied to Rothe: Winkler never killed himself. He and other agents caught him as was trying to escape to Switzerland. They tortured him for more information and then hanged him. Rothe is thoroughly disillusioned at this point. He had come to admire Winkler for trying to organize an assassination attempt against Hitler, and he has even more contempt for Novak now that he knows Novak’s role in Winkler’s death.

Novak tells Rothe that he and Rothe have always been lucky, and they are both lucky now to be alive. But Rothe doesn’t want to be alive and remember all that he has done, which now includes his unwitting role in leading Novak to Winkler and the secret assassination plot. Rothe pulls out Novak’s gun and then shoots him before he even has a chance to look up from the meal in front of him. Novak never believed that Rothe could shoot him or kill anyone. After shooting Novak, Rothe leaves the camp canteen and walks back to the railroad tracks. He stands on the tracks waiting for the next train, and when it arrives, he doesn’t jump out of the way.

I saw The Lost One twice on a borrowed DVD and again at the Internet Archive. The subtitles, that is, the translation, was slightly 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. For example, the DVD translation specifically identified Hösch as a Gestapo agent. The translation at the Internet Archive identified him simply as a concerned employee of the institute where both he and Dr. Rothe work. Even the spelling of Hösch’s name differs between the two versions: Hösch versus Hoesch.

As I said, The Lost One is a very dark film, even for a film noir. There aren’t many films, noir or otherwise, that end with all the main characters dead, as they do in this film. It is another example of the desperation that continued for so many people in Europe after World War II ended. I tend to think of the armistice as a definite ending point to the war. All the conflict had ended, and society was finally able to return to normal. That’s what I was taught. But that was not really true, not even here in the United States, where there was no fighting and there was no rubble to remind people of the horrors of war. If everything really had returned to normal, there probably wouldn’t have been an audience for film noir after World War II.

The Lost One is a great film and a good representation of life during and immediately after World War II. I saw it three times, and repeat viewings are certainly a big help in understanding the plot, especially because it is a German film. But it is not necessarily an easy film to watch.

September 7, 1951, release date  •  Directed by Peter Lorre  •  Screenplay by Peter Lorre, Benno Vigny, Axel Eggebrecht, Helmut Käutner  •  Music by Willy Schmidt-Gentner  •  Edited by Carl Otto Bartning  •  Cinematography by Václav Vich

Peter Lorre as Dr. Karl Rothe (aka Neumeister)  •  Karl John as Novak (aka Hösch/Hoesch)  •  Helmuth Rudolph as Colonel Winkler  •  Johanna Hofer as Frau Hermann  •  Renate Mannhardt as Inge Hermann  •  Eva Ingeborg Scholz as Ursula Weber  •  Lotte Rausch as Helene, the woman on the train  •  Gisela Trowe as the prostitute  •  Hansi Wendler as Dolien, Rothe’s secretary  •  Kurt Meister as Preefke  •  Alexander Hunzinger as the drunk  •  Josef Dahmen as Liske, the canteen manager •  Georg Siebert as Placzek, the man with the injured eye

Distributed by National-Filmverleih  •  Produced by Arnold Pressburger Filmproduktion

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