M (German: M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder) is a 1931 German drama-thriller directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. It was Lang's first sound film, although he had directed over a dozen films previously.
The film has become a classic which Lang himself considered his finest work.
A group of children are playing a game involving a song about a child murderer. This foreshadows the appearance of Hans Beckert (Peter...
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M (German: M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder) is a 1931 German drama-thriller directed by Fritz Lang and written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou. It was Lang's first sound film, although he had directed over a dozen films previously.
The film has become a classic which Lang himself considered his finest work.
A group of children are playing a game involving a song about a child murderer. This foreshadows the appearance of Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), a serial killer — and, it is implied, a pedophile — who preys on children in 1930s Berlin. Initially the audience does not see his face; they merely see his shadow, shots of his body and hear him whistling "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt as he buys a balloon from a blind man and gives it to a little girl named Elsie Beckmann (Inge Landgut). In the next scene, her mother (Ellen Widmann) searches frantically as the audience sees the balloon ensnared in telephone lines, and subsequently floating away....
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