It’s not easy writing a fair history of cinema while locked into hero worship for directors. Yet many of us are resolved to be loyal to the medium, and to overlook the faults of its heroes. Are the pressures and opportunities in filmmaking so bound up with power over the millions, and so tied to money, that behavior suffers? Anyway, Lang didn’t take the job with Nazi film. But there was another candidate, of course, and we’ll be meeting her.
M
It can be hard being discovered. You may never quite possess yourself again. Fritz Lang would say later on that he had “discovered” Peter Lorre in the German theater. But Lorre had been acting for five years or so already, working hard. He was discovering himself, and so far as anyone could tell, he was set on a career onstage. But there were warning hints. A few people said that with his diminutive stature, his smart baby’s face, his popping eyes (plus his weakness for drugs—begun after surgery, but extended to health), sooner or later Lorre was likely to be cast as villains or degenerates. He deserved better. He was accomplished at comedy and the grotesque, yet he had a plaintive streak in him, too. The photographer Lotte Jacobi could hardly stop looking at him and taking his picture. And Lorre had a girlfriend, Celia Lovsky, who believed that Peter should meet Fritz Lang.
This was 1929, in Berlin. Lorre was twenty-five, born László Löwenstein in a small town in Hungary. In just the last year he had had a dozen parts, including Ong Chi Seng, the intermediary, in a version of Somerset Maugham’s The Letter, St. Just in Danton’s Death, Dr. Nakamura in Brecht’s Happy End (he and Brecht were friends), and the fourteen-year-old sex-crazed Moritz Stiefel in Wedekind’s Spring Awakening. Lang saw that last show, at least, and was impressed. That’s when he “discovered” the actor and asked him if he had made a movie yet. No, said Lorre (he was lying). Very well, said Lang, I want to use you in my first sound film. It is some way off still, so you must promise that you will not make a movie for anyone else.
What will this picture be? asked the actor, and Lang told him he could not say yet. Lorre agreed to the arrangement.
It’s not clear if Lang had any real idea yet of M, or was just securing an actor and a presence he found striking. But by 1930 he was determined to make a sound picture, and inclined to use the new refinement like a shot of cocaine. He wanted to make a smaller picture than he had been accustomed to, something more intimate. So he asked his wife and his screenwriter, Thea, what was the most loathsome crime she could think of. She mulled it over and settled on the writing of poison-pen letters. (It’s a sign that Thea von Harbou may have been a modest soul.) But Lang came back a little later and asked her, what about a child killer?
There were several serial killers capturing headlines in the Germany of that time. In Berlin, there was a man named Großmann; in Hanover, there was a notorious “butcher”; and in Düsseldorf, there was Peter Kürten. Lang tried to make it clear that he and Thea had done their script for M before Kürten’s story was revealed. But it hardly matters. I think we know that Fritz Lang could have imagined M, or what he had also thought of calling The Murderer Among Us. In addition, Peter Kürten was ready to kill anyone, while Hans Beckert, the character in M, has an eye that preys on children.
In 1931 no American studio would have entertained the thought of a film about a child killer—though Hollywood at that time was giddy with excitement (and box office) over gangsters. In Public Enemy (1931), James Cagney was made into a star as the street kid who becomes a hoodlum and guns down any number of people (more or less deserving of that fate, or employed to risk it). Public Enemy was rightly hailed as a “violent” picture, even if the most brutal moment in it for many people—because it is so unexpected—is where Cagney rams half a grapefruit into the face of his moll (played by Mae Clarke).
Violence is a tricky issue, and one we shall return to, but Fritz Lang protested that M was a film of “no violence—all this happens behind the scene, so to speak. I give an example: you remember the scene where the little girl is murdered? All you see is a ball rolling and stopping. Afterwards a balloon getting stuck in the telephone wires. Where is the violence?”
To be precise, Lang is correct (though he also tried to tell the same questioner that the scene in The Big Heat where Lee Marvin throws scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face was not violent either). You don’t have to trust what film directors say; it’s hard enough sometimes to handle what they show. No, we do not see the murderer in M killing a child. Still, I doubt that anyone has ever seen M and not been affected by the thought of that action. That is a tribute to Lang’s genius and purpose as an artist—which amounts to the attempt to show how thoroughly violence had eroded society. But if it was impossible to do M with the sight (and sound) of a child being strangled (and I hope it would be still), then it’s worth asking ourselves what impact there has been in the seemingly endless and inventive spectacle of more or less attractive guys gunning down other guys—and this motif goes from Public Enemy to Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009).
The thing about Lang’s M that would have horrified an American studio in 1931 is the meticulous oppressiveness of the film and the airless dread in setting and mood that Lang carried over from Metropolis. That’s why M is a great film, and so subversive. After all, the grim movie ends with a pious voice uttering the cry “We, too, should keep a closer watch on our children,” while it is shot through with the gloomy conviction that another kind of warped child—Peter Kürten himself, or Hans Beckert—must have his way in a cityscape that can only endure such outrages. At the start of the film, a children’s game is introduced as a guarantee of malign fate. We see a circle of children playing a game, a version of “You’re out,” with the chant “The evil little man in black will come…He will chop you up.” And it’s not just those words, or the ghastly symbol of the game, it’s the way the “open” ground where the children play is so palpably a set, part of an inescapable urban enclosure, where air has been replaced by theatrical light. Forget the fate of the children—what life could they find in a city that seems to be buried underground? Time and again, Lang’s city is a mortuary where human figures make their frantic dance.
So in M the very texture of cinematic expression amounts to a trap in which the children and Beckert are caught. This predicament presages the coup of the film, an image that resounds with the tricky nature of cinema and the age-old dread of the doppelgänger who will confound his better self. I refer to the image where Beckert—identified by the street life as a murderer, and marked down as such—suddenly looks over his shoulder and sees the reflection of a ragged white-chalk M on his dark overcoat, like a wound or a disease. Not even Lotte Jacobi ever made more of Lorre’s fleshy face or his horrified eyes. It is a superb image, expressive not just of this one film or even of Lang’s haunting career, but of the idea throughout film that we may meet our other and know the dismay of exposure. It is one of those moments in which we are physically reminded that a character looking in a mirror is like us looking at a screen.
The structure of M that drew so much comment—of the murderer being pursued by the forces of both law and outlawry—is another version of the trap Beckert faces. And Lang is so expert at confronting two unwholesome gangs that we quickly devour the ironies whereby the good and the bad are equally determined to crush the deranged figure who has upset the balance of their city. Nothing in the movie bothers with the ugliness of that balance, or the degree to which it stands for a way of life that will suffocate true childhood—even if it disapproves of the strangling. Indeed, nothing in M, in Metropolis, or in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse really believes in an urban order or style in which life might be worth living. I think the same charge can be leveled at the best films Lang made in America—The Big Heat (1953), for instance, where Glenn Ford’s avenging detective is left alone at the end in the ruins of a corrupt city, and may be perilously unbalanced. But it is a very American touch that he loses a wife and saves his daughter. Lang’s first American film, Fury (1936), in which Spencer Tracy play
s a man who is nearly lynched, was prompted by an actual lynching in San Jose in November 1933 (the last recorded in California), when two men were dragged out of jail, stripped, castrated, and hung up for public inspection. The town mayor and the governor of California, James Rolph, Jr., approved of the lynching, and no one was ever imprisoned for it. Fury is a tough film for 1936—Graham Greene called it an extraordinary achievement—but it never got close to the reality of San Jose. In America, the industry and its urge to be positive conferred a sketchy optimism on Lang in return for his sacrificing the bleak magnificence of his art.
There is no one to like or admire in M—so what happens to the energy or involvement that the film’s authority commands? It descends on the woeful figure of Beckert and his frenzied assertion of helplessness. It’s at this point that our not seeing Beckert kill—in the way we are spared overt violence, as Lang might claim—is so important. After all, Beckert has no life or identity except that of killer. All we see of him is that drape of overcoat and the drab hat in which he prowls the city. He has no other exercise, and not the least explanation as to why he is a child killer.
Yet it’s clear that Peter Lorre is the star of the film, no matter how heinous a figure Beckert may be. The drama is waiting on that moment when Beckert, captured and undergoing an unofficial trial, will break down and let his words tumble out. This is where the harsh sounds of the city, the eery whistling, and the tramping noise of brutal men give way to speech and acting. We realize that M would hardly have been possible or inviting to Lang as a silent film. Its action might have played out, but Lang’s incentive is wanting to hear the murderer speak. And the film will end abruptly, without a verdict or a sentence in the “trial.” There is no doubt about Beckert’s being a serial killer. But M does not settle his fate. He is arrested by the police (as opposed to the criminals), and the film stops. If he were to go on to a proper trial we’d know his testimony already. It spills out in Lorre’s unrestrained performance, one of the first on film that depends on synchronized speech and its revelation of a deranged inner being:
I want to escape…to escape from myself!…but it’s impossible. I can’t. I can’t escape. I have to obey it. I have to run…run…streets…endless streets. I want to escape. I want to get away. And I am pursued by ghosts. Ghosts of mothers. And of those children…They never leave me. They are here, there, always, always. Always…except…except when I do it…when I…Then I can’t remember anything…And afterwards I see those posters and I read what I’ve done…I read and…and read…Did I do that? But I can’t remember anything about it…But who will believe me? Who knows what it feels like to be me? How I’m forced to act…How I must…Don’t want to, but must. And then…a voice screams…I can’t bear to hear it.
It is a testament to helplessness, and there’s a frightening link between human helplessness and the possibility that the camera can make irresponsibility available, because it so adept at “recording, not thinking.”
Observers of the filming reported that Lang drove Lorre hard—as was his custom. He also discouraged other people on the set from talking to his lead actor. He wanted to isolate him emotionally, as if to induce the killer’s state of loneliness. Lorre stood up to the ordeal, despite long days on the “trial” sequence. His only shortcoming was that he could not whistle adequately—so Lang did the whistling himself. You can see Lorre’s performance still, and it shows a demented person, just as it reveals that we are watching a film about a murderer, not the act or process of murder and not the victims. Lorre’s biographer Stephen D. Youngkin also unearthed a print of M, le Maudit, the French version made right after the German M. It had another director (identity not known), but Youngkin reports that Lorre’s performance in the French version—in which his voice was dubbed—was far more unrestrained and markedly less effective.
So here is a “classic,” and arguably Lang’s greatest work. But notice how far-reaching it is in its consequences. Though the American gangster films of the early 1930s never dared show a child killer, they did equivocate over their “monsters.” Scarface (1932), with Paul Muni as Tony Camonte, was subtitled Shame of a Nation, in case the film was thought to be too enthusiastic about its gangsters. But that was the energy or vicarious thrill that made such films appealing, and which helped turn Cagney and Edward G. Robinson into flamboyant stars.
M is a quite different case, in which Lang effectively introduces the idea, fleshed out by Lorre’s intense performance, that the child killer is driven beyond self-control or moral self-awareness. Our society still struggles with such issues, and the growing reluctance to execute murderers has gone hand in hand with an attempt to understand psychopathic personality. One of the most alarming things in M concerns what can only be called sympathy. We do not respond to Beckert as someone who has actually killed children—our children. Not that there is any question about his guilt. Still, the killer’s explanation of himself in M does not have to be believed. It may be beyond that just because it is so well acted. But is it Lorre acting, or is it Beckert? Here is one of the insoluble mysteries in film, the deepest level of doubling and moral confusion. Because we watch this confession (without having to witness the murders), our point of view is subtly detached. We are in awe of Lorre, and that cannot exclude sympathy, or something more complex than horror or loathing for what his character has done. This is the first notable killer on film who steps over that line of identity, and clearly he is carried over by sound, by speech, and the noise of breathing or being alive.
Actors will tell you that, no matter the evil in a role, they have to like their characters to do a good job. We honor what they say, and their experience, but that concession is a first step toward the possibility that we are all of us always acting out our selves, presenting ourselves in everyday life, and are forever unreliable or promiscuous. So we may like or dislike people, but we can never be sure of them. This is an irreversible shift in the departure from humanity or humanism, for it is not a matter of calculated deception so much as an organic, helpless pretending: I pretend, therefore I am. It is not too far from Jean Renoir’s feeling that everyone has his or her reasons—or their actor’s sense of a role. That thought from La Règle du Jeu (1939) is often considered a sign of Renoir’s generosity or openness. But it also conveys an epistemological solitude and the way existence has become performance.
These days, with censorship nearly exhausted, the process on film has gone a lot further. In The Silence of the Lambs (1991), it is made clear enough for most tastes what Hannibal Lecter does to his victims. At the same time, his character becomes so helpful to the heroine Clarice (Jodie Foster), that a fragrance of attraction develops between them. Only a few years later, in the sequel, Hannibal (2001), there was what amounted to a love story between Lecter and the new Clarice (Julianne Moore). In addition, though playing no more than a supporting part in The Silence of the Lambs, Anthony Hopkins had won the Oscar while becoming a fond household bogeyman whom many of us took pleasure in imitating.
By then, Hopkins was so big as a star or versatile enough as an actor to resist the threat of typecasting. Peter Lorre was not so lucky. M was an international sensation in 1931. It established Lorre and effectively ended his theatrical career. But it also locked him into sinister or horrific parts. Like many, he left Europe in the early 1930s and kept busy in America. He had notable small roles (in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca), but eight times he had to play the Japanese detective Mr. Moto. He was steadily more dismayed by the way his range as an actor had shrunk; his reputation and his offers were always under the shadow of Hans Beckert. Lang never worked with him again.
Do we understand child killers better because of M? Or have we only picked up a taboo thrill? Did this celebrated film introduce a line of films about psychopaths—fodder for great acting, perhaps, but steps in a process whereby society was expected to digest unspeakable actions? Perhaps there is no understanding of that sort of criminal process? Perhaps the attempt to assess it only makes it
seem more accessible or “normal”? I don’t place any reservations on the estimate of M as a major work, but who can deny that it helped open up the possibility of less-austere films about chronic killers where spilled blood and the lifelike illusion of slaughter run wild? In Dexter, we are coming up on another season for a TV show about a serial killer (who also works to catch killers).
Lang’s pessimism is signaled in his every detail and nuance, but there are now so many films about psychotics that revel in and exploit the inexplicable violence. Lang’s big lie, I think, was in denying his own appetite for murderousness and film’s impassive but mounting ease with it.
State Film—Film State
If you look at the new sensations of the last 120 years, their impact on us has been so drastic, exhilarating, or dangerous you can see why the state has intervened with measures of control—I’m thinking of drugs, the television airwaves, the automobile and the highways, guns and gambling. You might add compulsory education, once regarded with awe and hope. All those invasions were regulated until some of us decided regulation was alien to liberty. But the movie, in America, was left to the marketplace and free enterprise. Not that that protected the people who owned and ran the film business from fearful anticipation of government intervention.
The history of Hollywood in the 1920s is one of a rapid economic expansion coupled with wild behavior on the part of some filmmakers that led to hurried self-imposed regulation. Better have Will Hays and his code, an Academy and its prizes, than government licensing. To this day in the United States, movies are rated as G, PG, R, and NC-17, and theaters are expected to enforce those “rules.” But they are not laws, and you may have noticed that the caring system lets you take a three-year-old to The Exorcist, Psycho, or The Silence of the Lambs, so long as the child stays quiet. The child is said to be “with” you, or in your care—yet we all know how alone we are in the dark.
The Big Screen Page 9