M2

M (1951)

David Wayne, Luther Adler, Howard Da Silva, Martin Gabel, Karen Morley, Jim Backus, Raymond Burr, Steve Brodie, Norman Lloyd; dir. Joseph Losey

M, when you think about it, is just made for hardboiled postwar U.S. paranoia. Seymour Nebenzal thought about it, and as the producer of the 1931 original, convinced a reluctant Joseph Losey to take on this American remake. The director’s leftish sympathies had already brought him under HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) scrutiny, and to minimize the risk of any new project appearing subversive in this overheated environment, an established classic seemed a safe bet.

What were they thinking?!? Fritz Lang’s German original brilliantly captured a society at war with itself, with suspicion permeating the very air people breathe and everyone guilty until proven innocent. This early nuclear-age remake then did for Cold War America what the original did for Nazi Germany, capturing the paranoia of the times with a ferocity equal to its forebear.

Much of the new version is so close to the first it could have come off Fritz Lang’s storyboards. But the differences are crucial. The climactic ‘trial’ is distinct to this version in representing the ‘voice of the people’, whose sympathetic visual framing and pleas for ‘family’ distance these foot soldiers of urban America from the criminal class which constituted Lang’s underworld jury. Losey’s M clearly portrays the HUAC Senate hearings as the kangaroo court they would eventually be exposed as. "My client only wants a fair trial, but we’ll settle for this", says the murderer’s bent lawyer.

Another key distinction with the portrayal of twenty years earlier is the lack here of intercutting between the executive levels of cops, crims and press grappling with ways to solve the problems (for their business) of this stray murderer. Yet when the press are called in late in Losey’s M it is more insidious as we see the underworld boss offer a star reporter the scoop on the story in return for a lighter run by the paper on an upcoming grand jury investigation. Not even the media get off lightly in Losey’s universe.

Some of the transposition across versions doesn’t work two decades on. The ‘branding’ of the hunted murderer with an ‘M’ over his shoulder blades stands revealed in a modern take as ludicrous, while in subterranean 30s Germany it seemed no more bizarre than anything else.

An important, and quite confronting, new scene is when the killer garrotes a clay doll in his apartment – this being our first clear view of the murderer out of the shadows in which he is introduced. These opening scenes brilliantly evoke the Cold War paranoia of a faceless evil stalking among us, as he is seen repeatedly with his face only in total blackness like a shadow cut-out. Throughout M the compressed blacks and whites of the stunning cinematography by Ernest Lazlo (Kiss Me Deadly, D.O.A.) brilliantly conspire to link all the members of this environment into one milieu, achieving the sense of communal sickness which Lang achieved more through juxtaposition.

Typical of the decidedly ambiguous sexual politics of prime Losey (see his The Servant [1963], The Go-Between [1971], even Concrete Jungle to some extent), much here turns on gender. When the child-killer is spotted leaving with a new victim a pursuer turns the corner only to see (in a point of view shared by we, the audience) numerous mothers holding hands with a daughter, their eerie normalcy redolent of alien invasion pod-flicks like Invasion of the Body Snatchers; trapped like a rat in the warehouse, the killer’s mobility is impeded as he continually bumps into the disembodied legs (only) of curvaceous female mannequin body parts (compare the similar scene in Kubrick’s The Killing [1956]); before finally, getting literal, his ‘trial’ speech explicitly singles out the male of the species for blame.

Speaking of body parts, it’s interesting also how many disabled people are cast in pursuit roles. The blind balloon-seller of the original is augmented here by a cane-dependent shoeshine boy (a WWII allusion?) who pursues the killer as he descends down the Bunker Hill steps into the symbolic hell of the lower roadway. This leads to his doom in the famed Bradbury Building, whose internal staircases made it a noir icon in Double Indemnity.

Wonderful (and welcome!) comic relief is provided by Luther Adler as the elegantly marinated lawyer who pops up repeatedly as a foil to the grim earnestness of his criminal surroundings. He has a droll early scene of launching, on auto-pilot, into the lawyer-speak of high moral values in defending the indefensible that makes a pointed mockery of the hired gun legal system of which HUAC was a grotesque extension. That he concludes this with a satiric nod to raspy-throated thug Raymond Burr as "an upstanding and honest member of the jury" brilliantly combines the contemporary McCarthyist metaphor with an homage to the trial-by-criminals climax of the Fritz Lang original.

It has to be said that the thugs here are a collection that’s never been bettered, and provide oblique comment on Jim Backus’ cynical mayor, too busy opening a supermarket in suburbia to roll up his sleeves and address the fear paralyzing his city when he can delegate the work to subordinates.

Losey’s M is a truly lost classic, unjustly burdened with the stigma of ‘Hollywood remake’ and prevented from enjoying the retrospective gloss of cult rebirth due to its enduringly creepy subject matter, so starkly and powerfully is it rendered. Fusing the unspeakable and the familiar, M remains a confronting indictment of systemic mass hysteria.

Roger Westcombe's own website is at: http://www.bighousefilm.com/

For an excellent career overview of Joseph Losey, see: Dan Callahan, 'Joseph Losey', Senses of Cinema, at:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/03/losey.html

Back to:

Film Review List

Crime Films

Home