One of the Greatest Film Noirs of All-Time Was Remade 20 Years Later and Has Gone Mostly Underseen

In the history of world cinema, there are not that many examples of films, the influence of which is so great, it keeps resurfacing decades later, even if the movie in question was largely forgotten by the wider audience. Undoubtedly, one of such films is Fritz Lang‘s M — the first sound film in its director’s career. Having been released in 1931, M didn’t merely become a milestone in the classic’s filmography, but came off as a breakthrough for the genre of psychological thriller, procedurals, true crime (as some of the core elements of the plot were based on Lang’s research on several real serial killers, including Peter Kürten, as well as his knowledge of the Ringvereine, the criminal underworld in Germany), and, especially, film noir. 20 years after the release of Lang’s masterpiece, it received an American remake. The 1951 version of M featured a strong cast, an appropriately grim atmosphere, and was well-received by both critics and viewers, but it remained a film that pales in comparison to the original.

The Original ‘M’ Is One of the First Films to Dive into the Mind of a Serial Killer

In the first scene of Lang’s M, children play, while chanting a morbid song about a mysterious killer who might come for them — not dissimilar to the trademark chant about Freddy Krueger. Just like Freddy, the notorious child murderer that haunts Berlin, seems to be an almost mythical creature, someone who the kids and even their parents waiting for them at home, don’t entirely believe is real. Then, yet another little girl’s place at the table remains empty, as the killer claims a new victim, and the city once again becomes seized with fear, panic, and paranoia. The police, who have been ineffective so far, are pressured to work faster, pursuing every possible lead. Their newfound zeal brings an unexpected result, as the bosses of the criminal world aren’t happy with the officers disrupting their routine all over the city, and come up with their own plan to catch and punish the killer.

As the audience, we aren’t chasing the mystery together with the police and the Ringvereine. We know who the murderer is right from the start, as he emerges on screen as a shadow, just like the ones he lurks among. Despite the macabre fame that precedes him, Hans Beckert, played to perfection by Peter Lorre, who, just as Lang, would leave Germany for the US and would become widely known thanks to The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and Arsenic and Old Lace, looks like an ordinary man, not a supernatural embodiment of evil. At the start of the 1930s, films about maniacs weren’t really a thing, and Lang, rather unconventionally, dives into the inner world of a killer, instead of merely focusing on the investigation. Moreover, Lang even manages to extract some sort of sympathy for Lorre’s character — a monster, but also a human, tortured by the evil inside his own head, the fire, the voices, and the torment, as he, himself, desperately screams at one point.

Lang’s ‘M’ Isn’t Just a Serial Killer Story — But a Portrait of a Tortured Society

Lang famously avoided showing any graphic violence against children on screen, choosing to imply it instead with glimpses of a ball rolling into the grass or a balloon stuck in the telephone lines. Relying on the audience’s imagination, which just makes the film so much more effectively scary, Lang speaks an advanced, more modern cinematic language here. The sound isn’t merely there to provide info to the audience. Instead, Lang uses its whole range, including prolonged sequences of silence to build up the unbearable tension. The film’s visual style stands on the shoulders of the great tradition of German expressionism of the ’20s, including Lang’s own earlier works; all the while, M paves the path for the future film noir style, with its deep, meaningful shadows and distorted angles showcasing the disfigured world around us.

By 1951, film noir was already an established tradition in cinema, so Losey’s style in the remake, while impressive, doesn’t come off as something groundbreaking. But that’s not what makes this technically more advanced version still inferior to the original. Lang’s M is filled with an almost existential dread, the fragile world, squeezed between two world wars, rapidly falling apart, with a shadow of a monstrous evil hanging over the semblance of familiar reality. This atmosphere of fear and foreboding can be tied to Lang’s personal experience with the said evil, as he was being poached by Joseph Goebbels, impressed by Die Nibelungen and Metropolis, to work on the propagandist films. In just a few years, the director would be forced to leave Germany, while his wife and the co-writer of M, Thea von Harbou, remained.

This profoundly terrifying feeling is just missing from the otherwise great remake, where the story is moved to contemporary Los Angeles — thus helping to distinguish a good, powerful movie from one of the greatest films ever made. Losey’s version, which was initiated by M‘s original producer, Seymour Nebenzal (with Lang refusing to direct the remake), was, of course, engulfed in its own contexts and meanings. In the reality of America of the ’50s, the paranoia and suspicions spread throughout Losey’s film can be read as a paraphrase of the Red Scare and blacklisting practices, which, ironically, impacted its director too, as he would be banned from working and forced to leave the country in 1953. Yet, the feeling of skimming the edge of a catastrophe is so much broader and deeper in Lang’s M, with its parting warning about needing to keep a closer watch over children, which betrays the painful realization that it just might be too late.