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
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