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
