M [2 Discs] [Criterion Collection]

MOVIE DESCRIPTION:

Fritz Lang's classic early talkie crime melodrama is set in 1931 Berlin. The police are anxious to capture an elusive child murderer (Peter Lorre), and they begin rounding up every criminal in town. The underworld leaders decide to take the heat off their activities by catching the child killer themselves. Once the killer is fingered, he is marked with the letter "M" chalked on his back. He is tracked down and captured by the combined forces of the Berlin criminal community, who put him on trial for his life in a kangaroo court. The killer pleads for mercy, whining that he can't control his homicidal instincts. The police close in and rescue the killer from the underworld so that he can stand trial again in "respectable" circumstances. Some prints of the film end with a caution to the audience to watch after their children more carefully. Filmed in Germany, M was the film that solidified Fritz Lang's reputation with American audiences, and it also made a star out of Peter Lorre (previously a specialist in comedy roles!). M was remade by Hollywood in 1951, with David Wayne giving a serviceable performance as the killer. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

DVD FEATURES:

• Number of Discs: 2
• Audio: Dolby Digital Mono
• Screen: Black and White
• Subtitle: English
• Features:
  • Disc One - The Film:
  • new, restored high-definition Digital transfer, presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.19:1
  • Audio commentary by German film scholars Anton Kaes, author of the BFI film classics volume on M, and Eric Rentschler, author of The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife
  • New and improved English subtitle translation
  • Plus: a 32-page booklet featuring an essay by film critic Stanley Kauffmann, a 1963 interview with Lang, the script for a missing scene, and contemporaneous newspaper articles
  • Disc Two - The Supplements:
  • Conversation with Fritz Lang, a 50-minute film by William Friedkin
  • Claude Chabrol's M le maudit, a short film inspired by M, plus an interview with Chabrol by Pierre-Henri Gibert about Lang's filmmaking techniques
  • Classroom tapes of M editor Paul Falkenberg discussing the film and its history
  • Interview with Harold Nebenzal, the son of M producer Seymour Nebenzal
  • A physical history of M
  • Stills gallery, with behind-the-scenes photos, and production sketches by art director Emil Hasler

AWARDS

• National Board of Review

•     Won Best Foreign Film - 1933

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Cast:

  
       Peter Lorre - Franz Becker
       Ellen Widmann - Madam Becker
       Inge Landgut - Elsie
       Gustaf Gründgens - Schraenker
       Friedrich Gnass - Burglar

• Director:

  Fritz Lang

• Producer:

  Seymour Nebenzal

• Book Author:

  Egon Jacobson

• Screenwriter:

  Paul Falkenberg, Adolf Jansen, Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou

• Cinematographer:

  Fritz Arno Wagner

• Featured Music:

  Edvard Grieg

• Editor:

  Paul Falkenberg

• Production Designer:

  Emile Hasler, Karl Vollbrecht

REVIEW:

• One of the most distinguished and technically accomplished early sound films, Fritz Lang's M (1931) revealed the expressive possibilities for combining sound and visuals, in a metaphorically loaded story about pre-Nazi Germany. Working from the true story of the Dusseldorf child murders, Lang matches a mother's anguished calls for her daughter with images of an empty stairwell and a lost balloon rather than show the killing, while the murderer's obsessive whistling becomes the calling card for his threatening presence. Beyond the use of sound, Lang takes a pessimistic view of German society, using editing to equate the police with the criminals, while Fritz Arno Wagner's fluid cinematography creates a gloomy night world of shadows and paranoid entrapment. Lang's documentary-like attention to the details of the search, combined with the absence of non-diegetic music, matches the stylization with an equally creepy element of realism. The killer may be sick, but the society pursuing him isn't that much better. A worldwide success and a star-maker for Peter Lorre, M influenced movies from those of Orson Welles to the American film noir of the 1940s; Lang himself left Nazi Germany for Hollywood in 1933. The 111-minute version features an added courtroom ending. The movie was remade by Joseph Losey in 1951 as an allegory of Cold War-era Communist "witch hunts." ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide

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