Mörder

A couple of days ago I finally managed to have some German (and one American) friends over to watch M, a classic of German cinema and really one of the best films ever.

It is a bit hard to sell this film when persuading people to watch it, it is about a serial child killer after all. But it is so beautifully filmed, so funny in some places and so completely tragic in other places. The camera angles and use of shadows (most notably when the instantly recognisable profile of Peter Lorre falls on the "wanted" poster that little Elsie Beckmann is throwing her ball against) are just wonderful. And it has an ending that I think would be very controversial even to this day and in fact it was banned in Germany (and a few other places) and almost lost to the world. I could rave about it all day but I won't.

I really wanted to mention something that one of my friends said at one point in the film. The killer is identified and tracked by the towns criminals (not the Police!) and when he is first discovered my friend shouted "oh no, they don't have mobile phones!". Luckily the criminal can cope with this and ingeniously draws an "M" on to his hand with chalk and conspires to print it on to the killers back so that he cannot vanish into the crowd. It put me in mind of those "don't let your mobile ruin the film" adverts they have in cinemas - M would most certainly be ruined if mobile phones were involved!

It also made me feel relieved that I am old enough to have grown up without mobile phones or the internet. I like both but I am not dependant and I can manage to cope without either of them. In short, I know what chalk is for. And I am very pleased about it thanks.

Just found quite a nice trailer for it. No subtitles but you'll get the idea. There is no music in the film by the way, yet another of the many many nice things about it.