M (BFI Film Classics) Reviews

• M revisited? No, M revisiting our time

  
  By A2WAJWFB6ZPEGW on 2000-10-09
  After almost 7 decades since its making, Fritz Lang's M remains a poignant, modern film; a striking portrait of the human world as we live in. It is natural for the BFI to have chosen it as one of the 360 key films of all time. No other film deserves this status more than M.

  Fritz Lang, who always regarded M as his best film and the one by which he would be remembered, called it "a documentary". It is one of the first film about serial killers, and already Lang goes beyond depicting the pathology of such criminal; what M examines is the pathology of 20th century modern society.

  In this compact but meticulous study, Anton Kaes reveals the connection between the film and the Weimer German society in which it was made, and shows us how Lang fused his film with shrewd criticism and annualization of the world in which he lived in; a 20th century metropolis of mass society and mass-media culture. Yet he is not satisfied to put M back to its social context of the time. Lang's analysis of social pathology, and Kaes' explanations of it, inevitably reveals the parallel between that society of the 30's and ours of 70 years after. True, that the development of technologies has changed the face of the earth in all those years, but nevertheless the evolution took place in the same direction that Lang predicted 69 years ago.

  Kaes shares one brief chapter to analyze the 1951 Joseph Rosey's remake to point out that details may have changed (which restrained Lang from directing the remake himself), but the basic sociological pathology still applied in Los Angeles then. And it still remains so for that matters. The appendix shows the non-existent 6 minutes scene which was cut after the film passed the censor board. People from all over the town and the country call the plolice and proclaim to be the murderer. Lang recreated the same sequence later in THE BLUE GARDENIA. Paul Schrader said recently that in the culture of media and celebrity, there are no moralities. The deleted scene from M reveals that, and the same mentality is true more than ever at this beginning of the new century.
  
  

• Totally engrossing

  
  By A248OBQ0UUN6VL on 2002-03-09
  For most people if you tell them you are going to watch a movie or read a book about a child murderer they will look at you strangely. Don't kid yourself this IS a disturbing movie, from the opening sequence with the children singing a song about the "man in black" coming to get you to the end with the sobbing mothers warning this film is intense. The book places the movie in the context of Weimar Germany and is essential for understanding the use of imagery and the many subtexts that are present. The book is well written, hard to put down, and it really compliments the movie experience without either watering it down or making it too cerebral. For further reading I would encourage people to do a websearch on Fritz Haarman or Peter Kurten the actual serial killers the plot was loosely based on. If you thought serial killers were a modern invention, these guys make Ted Bundy look like an amateur.
  
  

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• M - 2 Disc Special Edition - Criterion Collection