M

Many critics have greeted Joseph Losey's 1951 remake of Fritz Lang's classic thriller M with derision.  Lang's film is a masterpiece featuring an iconic performance by Peter Lorre with script-doctoring by none other than Bertolt Brecht.  It would seem that a new version of this film, this time set in sunny Los Angeles as opposed to the dank and gloomy streets of Berlin, would be wholly superfluous.  But, Losey's film is memorable and holds its own against the 1930 German picture.  Because it's in English with bright clear settings, the later version is more approachable than Lang's somewhat daunting earlier film -- Lang's movie is too dark for its own good, particularly since time has ravaged most prints of the film, and his soundtrack, pioneering in 1930 (he gives the child murderer a theme -- the killer is always whistling Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King") -- is murky and sounds as if it were recorded over the telephone.  No one can replace Lorre, but the serial killer in Losey's film, when he finally offers his allocution, is excellent as well.


Most remakes enhance the experience offered by the original by upping the ante, that is, improving production values and accentuating elements that made the first film notable -- remakes are louder, longer, noisier.  (In Hollywood, loud, long, and noisy often means "more successful.")  Losey reverses this formula.  His M is swift, understated, and, its climax, in some respects more Brechtian than Brecht.  Losey brings the picture in at 70 minutes and there's not a wasted frame in the movie.  His ensemble are mostly well-established Hollywood character actors -- this is a film radical because without a hero.  (A booze-drenched and disbarred lawyer is the closest thing the film has to an admirable character.)  True to Lang's roots in German socialism, Losey's film is about collectives in action -- in this case, the criminals and the cops. (The child murders are mercifully peripheral to the film's main themes.)  As in Lang's picture, the serial murders of LA children infuriate and frustrate the cops who begin harassing otherwise innocuous prostitutes and gamblers.  When the police irrationally begin to persecute vice, the mob decides to use its demi monde network to identify the child-killer and bring him to justice, thereby keeping the heat off its racketeering.  The killer, an anguished man who seems to be of no particular age and have no distinguishing features (other than increasing hysteria), plays a sort of flutaphone to lure his victims to their deaths -- he's a vicious pied piper.  The film is quick to assert that the killer doesn't rape the children before murdering them but he does take their shoes as souvenirs -- a plot point that goes nowhere as far as I could see.  A blind balloon dealer has heard the killer's piping and identifies the man by that sound -- the tune the villain plays here is nowhere near as catchy as Grieg's melody in Lang's M; it's a rather plaintive, dour series of notes that sound like Debussy on a bad day.  The thugs chase the bad guy (who has a bratty little girl in tow) to the Bradbury Building.  There, an army of mobsters invades the closed building and smashes all the doors seeking the murderer whose suit coat (like Lorre's) has been marked with a chalk "M".  This is a bravura sequence with large groups of men charging around in the cast-iron walkways suspended in the great atrium of the Bradbury building (later to become famous for the penultimate scene in the original Bladerunner.)  The murderer is finally captured and dragged into a parking ramp for a sort of trial.  The mob threatens to beat the criminal to death but the chief gangster wants to demonstrate good faith to the cops by turning the child-murderer over to them.  (The cops are portrayed as thugs who torture their victims into confession.)  The mob boss orders the drunken lawyer to "make me a case" -- that is, argue for the innocence of the child-murderer -- to deter the crowd from tearing the man limb from limb.  The lawyer commences his oration and, implausibly, the mob listens to him.  The lawyer's summation is a powerful theatrical soliloquy although I'm not certain that it makes much sense.  When the lawyer equates the child-murderer's misdeeds to those of the gangsters, the mob boss guns him down just as the police converge on the underground parking lot where the "trial" has been conducted. 


M fits in solidly with film noir of the period although it is more theoretical than most pictures in that genre.  Losey makes great use of the old Bunker Hill neighborhood in LA, the place also featured in the wonderful film about Native Americans in the big city, The Exiles (made about a decade later) -- there is the tunnel, the Angel's Flight funicular, and the shabby Victorian rooming houses with steep, long stairways between them.  The location shooting is exciting and vivid, including sequences that seem to be set on the Santa Monica pier.  The final scene with the crowd of criminals, the tormented bloodied murderer, and the besotted lawyer is spectacular.  Losey stages the "trial" on the steep incline of a ramp leading down to the underground lot.  A sign at the top of the ramp reads portentously "Keep to the Right."  The tilted driveway where the action takes place is like the forced perspective in some stage sets, imposing a steep raked perspective on the sequence  -- the images call to mind Max Reinhardt's theater work in Berlin in the twenties, another example of Losey being more true to the Weimar era than the original film. The lawyer's speech is great although not coherent and Losey achieves powerful effects in this climax to his film.  The cast is crammed with character actors who specialized in playing heavies in the late forties and fifties -- it's a rogue's gallery featuring, among others, a very fat and sinister Raymond Burr and the great Norman Lloyd.  (Lloyd specialized in playing psychos and here he's particularly wonderful in a scene in which the thugs are breaking down doors in the Bradbury Building -- Lloyd comes upon a windowed door displaying a big eye, an optometrist's place, and passes by it; then, he pauses, shoots a sidelong glance at the camera, and retraces his steps to maliciously smash the eye to pieces.  It's funny and memorable.)  The killer has retreated to a mannequin factory and the impassive faces of the figures in that place are a counterpoint to the leering and menacing crooks.  There's nothing wrong with Losey's adaptation and a lot of it is excellent.