The Long Dark Marathon of the Soul 2021: M (1931), directed by Fritz Lang

 

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune - '"Red Right Hand" by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

       Here’s another film that’s been on the queue for years, and yet always managed to escape the list. Unlike with Wages of Fear however, we’re not dealing with an unknown here; This is Fritz Lang, director of Metropolis, also known as the film that I end up comparing every silent movie I’ve ever reviewed against, as well as Destiny, which wasn’t as good but still had moments of inspiration. Many directors go their entire career without making one film on the level of Metropolis, but just as many readers likely don’t realize that Metropolis was just one part of Lang’s storied career. A career which spanned several decades, continents, and genres, from the early days of silent film through the Golden Age of Hollywood all the way to the 60’s. In fact as much as I praise Metropolis, it’s arguably not Lang’s most lauded, most celebrated, most fondly remembered film -- this one is. So if I want to win any of those arguments, I better check it out for myself and see if that hype is real. Also I’m probably not actually going to argue, I just want to watch a movie.

       Released in Germany in 1931, M was directed by Fritz Lang, written by Lang and Thea von Harbou, and produced by Seymour Nebenzal through Nero-Film A.G. There’s a child murderer (Peter Lorre) loose in the streets of Berlin and the public is in an uproar. Accusations are thrown, people are being accosted and attacked on the street, and as usual the police’s way of handling it is heavy-handed and completely ineffectual. Well that’s not quite true, as the near constant bar raids and night patrols do raise the ire of Berlin’s criminal population. With their livelihood on the line the heads of the various syndicates decide to set up their own investigation in tandem with the police. As both sides of the law create a city-wide pincer movement it seems that the killer’s day are numbered, but you don’t become a serial killer in pop culture without being hard to catch. Moreover, if he is caught, who’s gonna get to him first?

       Film began as a principally visual medium, and Fritz Lang understood that better than most filmmakers. We can see that quite clearly in Metropolis with its elaborate effects, but we can see in M the kind of visual storytelling that Hitchcock would utilize in his thriller films. The scene of little Elsie Breckmann bouncing her ball against a pole where a notice of the murderer is posted, only to see that same ball roll slowly roll out a bush later on, a sign of the grisly act that has just taken place. Or during the scene where the murderer is running from his pursuers, and rather than making that shot look smooth the camera jostles as it races after him, coming to a stumbling stop as he turns towards us, compounding this atmosphere of panic. Hell, even the visual of the M, the brand which marks the killer for what he is, is a deceptively powerful look for how simple it is. While the film does have sound there’s a lot of it that is done in complete silence, and it really shows just how much a director can convey without saying anything. Not as dynamic as Metropolis, but powerful nonetheless.

       That’s not to say that the inclusion of sound here is just a gimmick, as it seemed to be in some early ‘talkies’, as Lang uses it quite distinctly in M. Edvard Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, originally written for the Henrik Ibsen play Peer Gynt takes on a sinister second life as the murderer’s favorite tune, and of course you couldn’t do Peter Lorre’s final speech justice without sound. It’s a bit strange that, rather than just having scenes being done without talking and leaving natural sound they are done with sound removed entirely, I don't know if that’s a matter of how it was preserved or what but it works. There’s not a wasted syllable in the bunch.

       Speaking of Peter Lorre, he is undoubtedly one of the highlights of this film. This was only his third ever film role, second ever credited, and he hits it out of the park. People talk up Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector, for good reason but I don’t know if anybody has ever embodied the concept of creepiness like Peter Lorre. You see him in M and you see on screen what you picture in your mind when you hear the words ‘child murderer’. The way he looks, the way he talks, how he smiles, Lorre’s every move and gesture arouses this feeling of anger in the viewer as naturally as blinking. His final speech is a powerful bit of acting, catching the viewer between the two extremes of pity and disgust. It’s no wonder he became a Hollywood staple for a couple decades after this, everything about him is iconic. That’s not to say that the rest of the cast were bad, there’s not a bad one in the bunch, but I don’t know if this film would be as strong as it was without the casting of Peter Lorre. It was a star-making kind of film and he was the star. 

What kind of film is M, though? I personally see it as a transitional film for Lang, between the German Expressionist movement that he helped to establish and what would become film noir. M’s subject matter is rooted in the underbelly of modern society, a film about criminals tracking down an even worse criminal, but there’s an aura of the bizarre about it that calls back to Fritz Lang’s origins. The directness of the visuals, the overpowering silence (intentional or otherwise), the weird little bits of humor the overwhelming weight of Lorre’s insane compulsions, while it’s not as out there as nightmarish as Expressionist classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari there’s still a surrealism that covers the film like a blanket. It’s a film with its feet in the past and the future, and you can see in it a throughline to Hitchcock and Batman and countless other pieces of art and media.

M receives the recommendation. While crime thrillers aren’t exactly an uncommon sight in film, it takes skill and vision to do it well, and Fritz Lang proves here that he is a skilled craftsman. While it’s not the grandiose cinematic experiment that Metropolis became, it’s a classic in its own right. Be sure to check this one out this Halloween if you’ve got a chance, it’s definitely worth the time. Maybe pair it with Psycho or Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, make it a really wild night. I don’t know if it’d be fun, but it would be memorable.

Reelin' In The Years -- Destiny (1921), directed by Fritz Lang

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Bring Me To Life", by Evanescence

       Is there any filmmaker that has gotten so much praise for so little (on this blog at least) as Fritz Lang? I mean I covered a single film of his, Metropolis, six years ago now and yet it feels like he’s constantly showing up in my name dropping sessions? Got a silent movie? Fritz Lang comes in. Science fiction movie? Fritz Lang. Movie that has even a hint of inspiration from German Expressionism? Fritz Lang. The man had been a filmmaker for over ten years before Metropolis and would continue to be one for decades afterward, as much as I loved that film it’s not necessarily indicative of who Fritz Lang was as an artist and filmmaker. Nor would it be for anyone, besides those folks who only ever did one movie I suppose. Conveniently enough, rectifying that problem also coincides with the kickoff of our unofficial Reelin’ In the Years Tour, and you better settle in because there’s a lot more silent black and white movies to come.

We begin our journey in 1921 with Destiny, or Der müde Tod, written (along with Thea von Harben) and directed by Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang, this being his eighth time in the director’s chair. Described as a ‘German Folk Song in Six Verses’, the film centers around a young couple who meet a mysterious stranger while taking a carriage ride into an unnamed village. When they stop off at the local inn the young woman goes off to play with some cats, and when she returns she finds her fiance gone, along with the stranger. Given that he resides in a vast walled structure without any windows or doors next to a cemetery, it should come as no surprise that this stranger is actually Death, and yet this doesn’t stop the young woman from pleading for her lover’s return. So Death gives her a challenge: if love really is as strong as death, then he’ll give her three chances, three lives of different lands and times, in order to prove it. If even one manages to succeed, then her fiance’s life will be returned to him. If not, well, better start making the down payment on that casket. But as long as it’s not chess, it’ll probably be fine.

Our leads here are Lil Dagover (who you might recognize from Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Walter Jannsen, and Bernard Goetzke as the Young Couple and Death respectively, as well as characters within the 3 lives segments. They’re...okay. Lil Dagover does most of the heavy lifting, which makes sense as she was the protagonist as well as the most famous actress in Germany at the time, but there’s not much to lift as they’re all rather simple characters. They try a little bit of comedy in the China story, which has a bit of charm to it. Mostly it’s weird, especially the kissing scene. I’m not sure who thought that looked good.   

       Where the film really shines, setting the stage for Metropolis a few years later, is Lang’s ambitious eye in regards to visual and set design. Not only do we get some nice looking shots in the village, like Death’s vast wall and the room of men’s lives, but then Destiny goes the extra mile and presents us with Renaissance-era Venice, Imperial China and the Ottoman Empire, filtered through the lens of German Expressionism. Lots of large spaces, interplays between light and shadows, warped scenery, and surprisingly not quite as culturally insensitive as you might expect from a bunch of German in the 1920’s. The most intriguing is arguably China, which in Lang’s hands becomes this strange, Carrollesque wonderland of wizards and storybook landscapes, as if you tasked someone to recite Marco Polo’s travelogue from memory while intoxicated.      

The only thing that I would consider enough of an issue to bring up would be the score, or rather how they use the score. It’s very basic, keeping in line with what you expect silent film music to sound like but not always to the context of the scene. The music during the scene where people are celebrating Ramadan, for example, feels very dour compared to the excited atmosphere that the visuals present, and scenes that would expect to be dour, like talking to the personification of death, sound vaguely cheery. Not really the movie’s fault so much as it is the distributor, Kino Lorber, but they’ve done good work in the past so we’ll call it a mulligan. Plus it’s a silent movie, so if you wanted to just hit the mute button and see if you can sync it up with Dark Side of the Moon there’s nothing stopping you. 

In the end, Destiny starts our Reelin’ In the Years tour off right with a recommendation. While I wouldn’t call it an extraordinary film, a solid B in even more solid filmography at the time, it’s an entertaining little tale with that now familiar Fritz Lang flair. Those entering into the world of silent film or love that tasty Expressionist style will find this an easy watch. Those who aren’t can stick with their regular, non-cinematic German folk songs. We won’t judge.

Metropolis, (1927), directed by Fritz Lang

The Trailer
and
The Appropriate Tune: "I Feel Love", by Donna Summer

"The mediator between brain and the hands must be the heart."

     In my little write up of Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, which you can find on my Long Dark Marathon of the Soul articles, I gave a little explanation as to my feelings on the ‘genre’ known as silent movies. As I said then, it’s not so much that I have an aversion to soundless films as that I’m not very experienced with them as a viewer. I’ve grown up in an age where the ‘talkie’ is a common thing after all, where the context of a film is gathered from the dialogue as much as it is the physical action, and it’s quite to split your attention between other things and still understand the events of the film. Watching silent films took a level of concentration that I wasn’t used to, and so in the past I haven’t been as involved mentally as more modern cinema. Now that I’m principally a ‘movie guy’ however, who is attempting to gain respect and perhaps actual legal tender from writing about films (and maybe making them, if I ever get the opportunity), I decided that it’s best for me and all you out there in internet land if I expanded my horizons as much as I can. You know, rather than try and improve my writing ability or anything like that, because that sounds hard and I’m too lazy.

     #truthbombs

     Even in it’s infancy, film was seen as an artistic medium as well as a business venture, and one of the most influential artistic movements in film is Expressionism. The most famous form of Expressionism in film is perhaps the so-called German Expressionism, which was most popular in the years leading up to WWII (by then they had other things on their mind). These Expressionist films, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu for example sought to portray an inner, subjective view of reality in direct opposition to realism, which resulted in the famous warped buildings, extensive shadows and highly stylized surrealistic tone that has become iconic. Many of these elements would later be adopted by directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, and there is a definite connection between German Expressionism and Universal’s horror films, particularly in Dracula and Frankenstein. Hell, Tim Burton probably would be directing Burger King commercials today if not for the visual style pioneered by the German Expressionist movement. We wouldn’t have had to suffer through his film remake of Dark Shadows though, so there’s a tradeoff.

     When it comes to silent era German expressionist film directors, you don’t get much bigger than Fritz Lang, and when you’re talking about silent era Fritz Lang films, you don’t get much bigger than Metropolis, released in 1927. I’ve had this particular film in my to-watch queue for quite a while now, but only now decided to check it out totally on a whim. I suppose it was my aversion to silent films that had kept me away for so long, and partially because I wasn’t sure which version of it should attempt. On netflix there are two edits of Metropolis you see; Metropolis Restored, which used previously lost footage to recreate Lang original 2+ hour cut, and Giorgio Moroder Presents Metropolis, released in 1984 featuring a soundtrack handpicked by the 80’s music legend himself, whom you might remember from that one song on Daft Punk’s last album. Although I have a deep passion for synthtastic 80s music, I decided to to go for the restored version in order to get the ‘true’ experience of the film. Plus I've dipped into the 80’s far too much recently, so I figured it was time for a change.

     The year is 2026 and mankind has finally reached its cultural zenith. Nowhere is this more apparent than Metropolis, a enormous, gleaming utopia of a city, where the residents bustle about the streets like ants around the legs of an elephant. Life for those who move within the boundaries of this veritable Garden of Eden is one of leisure and the pursuit of comfort for its affluent citizenry. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Clubs of the Sons, where the offspring of these wealthy men engage in the recreation of the rich, which involves banging a new chick every day and running track for some reason. Or, if you don’t feel like banging chicks at the Club of Sons, you could always go to Yoshiwara, the most popular night club/brothel in all of Metropolis, where good times can also be found. Basically, if you’re not a fan of good times, then you wouldn’t have a good time here

     A city as large as Metropolis needs an equally large number of people to maintain it however, and it is here where our major conflict resides. In true H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine fashion, the people are divided into two classes: the rich who live the idyllic live up above, and the laborers who toil on the great machines in the underground city. Unsurprisingly, these almost-Morlocks are treated like slaves by the rich owners of the machinery (apparently Republicans are still around in the future), and the two get along like vomit and fine wine. Also unsurprisingly, the oppressed working class is abuzz with talk of mass revolt, probably because of that whole ‘forced to live in an gigantic ghetto and dying en masse due to faulty machinery’ thing. You’d think that in a hundred years people would have learned not to oppress the working class and that it only leads to problems, but I guess old habits die hard.

     The most pampered of all the member of the Club is the good-hearted Freder (Gustav Worlich), son of Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel),architect of Metropolis and subsequently the most powerful man in the city. All that Freder knows are the things that his father has provided, but after a chance encounter with beautiful working girl Maria (Brigitte Helm), he starts to realize that there might be more to life than his olympian lifestyle. It just might be that Freder is The Chosen One, the prophesied mediator that will unite humanity together as one. Unfortunately for Freder and Maria, Ol’ Poppa Fredersen is none too keen on having his son fraternize with some lowly working girl, especially one preaching some sort of radical agenda. With the mad professor Rotwang and his mysterious Machine-Man, Fredersen plans to destroy Maria and Freder’s relationship and crush the rebellion before it even begins. Shenanigans abound, as they are known to do.

     Metropolis is essentially a big fairy tale: you’ve got a collection of archetypes, the whitebread hero, the pure damsel, the old ugly villain, the Christian imagery, all thrown together to tell a story with an obvious moral message (don’t put poor people in giant underground factories). Simple but effective, but where the film really stands out to me is in Lang’s visual design. Metropolis is a breathtakingly beautiful film, and Fritz’s Lang Expressionistic take on the future is every bit as fantastical as anything written by the Brothers Grimm. From the monolithic, monotonous housing complexes of Worker City to the radiant splendour of Metropolis itself, almost every scene looks like something out of a dream. Just an amazing sense of scale that I didn’t think was possible in the 20’s. Of course I’m a sucker for open space in film, as readers of my little write up of King Kong (or even my review of Easy Rider if you want to go obscure), but it is the space combined with the society that the director envisions that really strike me creatively. The combination of the old and modern is really fascinating to me, and really old sci-fi in general like in Batman: The Animated Series where there are robots walking around but the police department still uses zeppelins.

     As far as cons go, the ending seemed rather anticlimatic when compared to the buildup towards it. The subplot for setting up 11811 as an important character does little to establish that, so the resolution lacks the emotional impact it could have had. Some scenes also seem a bit foolish or otherwise are too deus ex machina for my tastes, such as Maria’s escape from her captors. I guess you could forgive it because of the time it was made, and sometimes you make allowances in the plot to tell a story, but there are just a couple moments where character actions made no sense and it was irksome to watch.

     As I mentioned earlier I watched Metropolis Restored, which added previously lost footage to bump it up to a 148 minute runtime, as opposed to shorter cuts like the 83 minutes Moroder edition. From what I could tell, the footage that was added was generally complimentary to the theatrical cut, and a lot of them expound on scenes that seemed to have been edited rather haphazardly back in ‘27. I’d say that you’re probably better off watching the Restored version, since it’s the closest to Fritz Lang’s original idea, but it’s your choice. That runtime is an obvious turnoff for some, but it’s a long movie that doesn’t really feel all that long to me due to how it’s paced. Which is the same way I felt about The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which I also loved, and which coincidentally is another fairly long movie with a lot of open space. Who would’ve guessed?

Result: Recommended