The beginning of film noir: Fritz Lang's M

M (Weimar Republic, 1931) D: Fritz Lang

I love film noir. It is, in fact my very favorite of all film genres, not the least because it is so inherently cinematic. This should come as no surprise, as the methods and strategies of this pre-eminently American art form is a direct descendent of the highly stylized Expressionistic film aesthetic that developed in Weimar Germany between the two world wars. These films were the localized products of the second-generation of film-makers, those visionary artists who crafted, in the years immediately following World War I, all the varieties and forms of what would come to be known as "the classic era of silent film."

While Hollywood developed its own styles and genres, its comedies, its melodramas, its swashbuckling adventure films, and its most very unique product, the western, two other cinematic production centers would go on radically different routes of internal development. In the young Soviet Union, theorists such as Lev Kuleshov and film-makers such as the great Sergei M. Eisenstein would develop and perfect the use of montage in order to create a didactic cinema that was prime for the education and modernization of masses in a collective society. As for Germany, however, the troubled, tumultuous history of a defeated nation struggling for a national identity would produce a much different way of looking at itself and the world through the camera lens than anywhere on earth.

The threads of despair, hope and uncertainty would give to German silent cinema its own very unique tone and approach. The term "expressionism," which came from the country’s modernist visual art tradition, as well as its development on stage would soon find its vision on the screen, as transformed by such brilliant artists as Robert Wiene (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, The Last Laugh), and perhaps most strikingly, in the fantastic films of Fritz Lang, such as Destiny, Dr. Mabuse the Gambler and Metropolis. The sometimes highly exaggerated, non-realistic décor and elaborate lighting schemes of these films were designed to project a heightened mood of internal conflict, obsession, paranoia and fear onto the visual world depicted onscreen.

With the rise of Nazism and the gradual decline of the Weimar experiment with democracy, expressionism fell by the wayside. But many of the masters of German cinema would flee to the United States, bringing their dark-hued native aesthetic with them, as well as their ingrained fear and pessimism. Beginning even before the end of Wold War II, the effects of this style began appearing on American screens in Hollywood productions. As the new style spread and became both popular and influential in this country, it gradually solidified into the definitive style that would shape and define America’s struggle to deal with its own post-war traumas and anxieties, up until the late 1950s.

Of course, one of the most fascinating facts about film noir was its almost total and complete lack of consciousness in documenting the dark undercurrents of the American psyche. It took years for the form to even find a name - it was christened by French critics and film students in the late 1940s - and it was even longer, after the cycle of films was actually completed, that it began to become truly understood and appreciated for what it was. The horrors of the war and its aftermath were consciously swept away by the semi-official optimism of the booming nation and its obsession with becoming a superficially defined commodity/consumer culture.

This self-enforced mental hygiene was so completely pervasive on all levels of American life, especially as reflected in the mainstream popular cinema of the day, that it could not help but explode into nightmarish apparitions of the most desperate and violent sort in a form that would be acceptable because it would not be recognizable for what it truly was. Film noir was wholesome America’s great transgressive popular art. It spoke for the subconscious repercussions of the horrific experiences that could not be articulated in the light of day. The dazed and self-repressed victims of the nation’s plunge into hell could be safely enacted and exorcised in the dark of a movie theater. And they could be left behind when the show was over. Their viewers could return, cathartically cleansed, much like the ancient Athenian after the festival of Dionysus, to the land of endless opportunity and boundless freedom - while the world they left in the dark below went on pitilessly being ruled by the iron-clad laws of relentless fatalism.

While it is important to make very clear distinctions between the organic development of film noir within this country and the very different circumstances that gave birth to expressionism in Germany, it is also quite necessary to point out the close relationships between the two movements. The similarities in historical situation aside, we also have the fact that noir would be, to a large degree, the product of expatriate director’s who fled from Hitler’s Germany both before, and during the war. And no single German director would have more impact that Fritz Lang, who would go on to help develop the new style in Hollywood and put his indelible personal stamp on those films.

But a good ten years before the birth of anything that we can properly can call film noir would begin to appear in the U.S., Lang directed what he considered to be the greatest accomplishment of his career: Germany’s first "sound" film, the dark, baroque and endlessly fascinating nightmare world of M (1931).

M is, arguably, the culmination of all of Lang’s work in Germany, as well as a kind of swan song for the expressionist film, per se. But it is not very difficult to look at this masterful work and see in it virtually all the formally stylistic and thematic elements that would contribute to making the American noir movement so potent and powerful. In fact, to tell the story of film noir, you must begin with M as your basic point of reference. (Unless you want to go all the way back to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [1920].)

 

What Is M About, Anyway?

Fritz Lang’s M is one of the most distinctive films ever made, both in its style and its content. It is a crime story, but of a very unconventional kind. The story concerns the searching of the city of Berlin, by both the police and the underworld for the capture of a serial child-killer. Such a strange and morbid subject came directly out of recent horrific events in Germany, along with the society of the day’s obsession with them, especially as they played out in the mass media of the new urban environment. The sensationalized exploits of Peter Kürten, for example, the so-called "Vampire of Düsseldorf", who had committed a long string of sexually violent murders in 1929 was certainly much in the news at the time. Lang insisted, however, that his film was not based on the exploits of one man, but that it was inspired by a number of serial killers of the time.

 

M’s murderer was a mild-looking and apparently innocuous petit-bourgeoise loner named Hans Beckert. While the urban jungle of Berlin was crawling with rough professional criminals, Beckert would unnoticeably prowl the streets, looking for little girls whom he would sweetly seduce with candy and balloons. M was almost certainly the most savage and horrific film ever made when it was first released, and its uncanny power and eerie tone remain extraordinarily disturbing up to the present day. Although the movie did not visually depict any of the killings, Lang used all his camera’s resources to force display the terror and pain of lost children and their families, and he made them squirm by forcing them to travel along with the mild-mannered Beckert while he makes his deadly seductions on beautiful small girls.

With such monster running in its midst, Berlin is transformed into a trapped, frightened city. The police begin cracking down on all gangland operations in an attempt to find the killer, thus shutting down all illegal activities. The criminals, just as organized as the police, begin their own investigation and work together to hunt the madman down. Through careful planning, close observation and military-like efficiency, the denizens of the underworld manage to identify, locate, and finally capture Beckert, and they take him, literally, to their underground headquarters where they hold him at trial and decide on his fate.

If this sounds like a really tough, hard-hitting melodrama, you haven’t seen anything. Fritz Lang fills the screen with dark, frightening images from beginning to end, painting the city of Berlin as a nightmare landscape, filled with a crawling vermin of unseen terrors. M is a landmark film in more ways than one: its purely cinematic approach to suspense was a great influence on Alfred Hitchcock, for one, and that’s saying quite a bit. It also serves as a summation of all the experiments of German cinema during the days of the Weimar Republic, and is its great last - probably its greatest - expression. It’s paranoia is repellently appropriate for a nation where fascists are about to remake the law into their own image. (Joseph Goebbels was very impressed by the film, and supposedly asked Lang to become the Nazi party’s chief movie-maker. Lang’s response was to immediately flee to America.)

 

But what we are precisely interested in here is perhaps M’s greatest influence - on the long and sustained impact the film and its creator would have on the great long Hollywood tradition which we so lovingly refer to today as film noir.

 

There is no possible way that I could do absolute justice to every piece of the noir world that M helped to much to contribute to its creation. So I will limit myself to just pointing out a few key elements here that we should keep in mind.

  

The City as Hell

The modern industrial city was truly a fascinating and endlessly enigmatic place. We must remember that what we know as the great modern city - the metropolis with its countless massive buildings, dark streets, bright lights and back alleys was a relatively new phenomenon. Great cities - whether Berlin, New York, San Francisco or Hong Kong - were mysterious places where an anonymous mankind wandered alone, alienated and cut off from itself. As more and more people moved from the familiar countryside and small towns to these gritty urban centers, the stranger and more congested they became, filled with darkness, dirt . . . and most of all, danger. Yes, cities, with all their neon glitter were seductive sights for sinners, but behind every lonely streetlight lurked another potential horror.

The city gives material form to unspoken fears and alienation. Its size, first of all, is massive, almost unknowable. Negotiating one takes an "insider’s" knowledge, something we still call "street smarts," and nobody who knew their way around could be fully innocent. And the sheer number of people - literally millions of souls cluster in and around these strange streets and tenements, yet all of them are strangers, both to each other, and perhaps to themselves. They are anonymous, interchangeable, and any one of them could likely be out for trouble. Then there are the buildings themselves, so enormous that they dwarf their inhabitants like ants, all scurrying around in their own pointless, meaningless directions. The giant skyscrapers are like gargantuan tombs, casting their shadows on the doomed and desperate population in mute observation and silent warning. Finally, there are the lights of the night. Everywhere there must be lights for the darkness - and their patterns reflect a strange artificial glow of crazy cross-works and dazzling pools that gives every inhabitant a constant reminder that the world they live in is not of the world that nature intended. Instead, it is a man-made jungle that disguises and distorts. And there is no way to tell where in whose face the dangers lie.

 

M’s Berlin is the archetypal dark city, the city of night. Its buildings dominate the environment, the night enshrouds the street-wanderer. And when the sun goes down and the dazzling lights come on, out of the hidden cracks come the swarming mass of criminals, crawling like cockroaches, and you will not see them unless they want you to see them - and by then it will be too late.

Berlin is also a forbidden world, a world literally underground, complete with hidden places that are connected by subterranean tunnels that only those "in the know" suspect they are there, and it is in these dark hidden places that they congregate, they conduct their private business, so black and foul that it cannot be truly named, parts of a maze that only the damned can negotiate. Sometimes they emerge, then just as quickly they are gone. But you cannot escape them. Here, you can walk side-by-side with a killer on a brightly neon lighted boulevard, happy as the day. Then you can step in a shadow and be gone in an instant.

This is the city as seen by Fritz Lang. It can even be said to be the film’s ultimate subject, it’s protagonist, even. This dark, seething world of alienation and fear, where everything is hidden and anything can happen was bequeathed to American filmmakers from their German predecessors. But the Germans didn’t invent the fear of the cities - that fear was real. They merely focused their lights on it. They gave it its style. And its style in M, complete with all its menacing power would be the world of the film noir jungle, the home of the malaise, the dirty and dark pit of hell itself. No one was innocent here. Or if they were, they would not last very long.
 

The "Double World" - The Cops and the Criminals

In the city, there are two worlds that function simultaneously and in many ways mirror one another. The world and operation of the police, above ground and in daylight, functions as a counterpoint to the similarly organized world of criminals who operate below the surface and in darkness. M not only makes this dichotomy explicit by intercutting between both of these world in operation, acting in a similar manner, but actually has them performing the same function: searching out and hunting down the mystery child-killer.

 

Lang is very insistent to show that despite their relative legal status (and in his film, their class status as well), that these two worlds necessarily intersect and often function on the same level. The result is a moral ambiguity between each of the two worlds: they are not so much a dichotomy between good and evil as much as they are two different aspects of the same wheel of necessity - one is approved of, and one is not, though they are both dependent upon the other.

In later American film noirs, we will see that the boundary line between these two sides of the law are very fluid and indistinct. "Crooked" cops will constantly be descending below the line, playing on both sides, and "underworld" figures will periodically surface to help the police (or as they do in M, to supplant them.)

We of course will also become familiar with that very unique archetype, the American private detective - the Sam Spade or Philip Marlow character who is equally at home on both sides of this dividing line so that he can operate more easily and efficiently. Though such figures are usually ultimately related to the daylight side of the law, they must know, work, and live in the darkness if they are to succeed. In later, more pessimistic noirs, the detective’s role becomes more ambiguous, as he is tempted to the dark side. Even the police will become increasingly more corrupt, supporting, or in some cases (i.e., Orson Welles’ A Touch of Evil [1958]), actually becoming them.
 

The Unstated War

What both M and the later film noir depict onscreen is an unstated counterpoint and reference to something occurring offscreen - that is, an actual war that is going on (or has recently gone on). Though rarely, if ever, made explicit, the rampant violence of the battlefield is reflected in the continued violence of the world of the street. In later film noir, even the noblest protagonists are quietly suffering victims of recent holocausts which has altered their perspectives not only towards violence, but to general morality and truth as well. This sickness, that was present in so many veterans of World War II was officially non-existent, shoved under the carpet of propaganda, and thus is almost never openly talked about.

As a matter of fact, it is apparently not even a recognizable factor in the written scenarios or made explicit in the direction of many films noir, but since we can see its suppression bursting into violence, over and over throughout the films of the postwar period, it is almost as if it exists in a filmic subconscious, which functions - as it did in real life - to cover up the brutal facts of experience and horror.

In Fritz Lang’s Weimar Republic, no one would need to be reminded of the fact of World War I. The entire country and culture was explicitly designed to be both an official and a psychological response, to Germany’s horrific experience in the war, as well as the consequences of its loss. Still, Lang chooses to make references explicit to those who will recognize his signals. His streets, teeming with organizations of beggars on the prowl, many blind or lame, missing one or both legs - these were familiar sights in postwar Berlin, as the crippled and the hungry survivors of a lost cause could be seen on every street corner.

Some critics have even speculated that Hans Beckert’s violent insanity is the likely result of shell-shock during the war. But while that as a plot point is highly speculative, there is no mistaking the fact that the social tendency toward both violence and madness, had its ultimate root in that horrific conflagration.

The fact that the results of such a trauma are buried in the wartime past of the villain/protagonist of such films make both M and American film noirs necessarily psychological - and perhaps more importantly, psychopathological - makes it essential for the viewer or analyst to look at them deeply, in psychoanalytic terms. By their very definition, such films carry guilty secrets just as do the mentally disturbed creations of traumas themselves. Such films can even be unaware of themselves and need to be picked apart in order to be comprehended.

Since these films function, like sick people, to repress a violent past or a current reality, we see the unintended consequences pouring out all over the screens. And, likewise, just as in life, such hidden secrets and fears emerge in all their vivid and terrible glory in dreams, so too, do the baroque, evocative styles of these movies come to the cinematic surface in all types of fantastic visual schematics and guises. As with German Expressionism, film noir is one of the genres of movie that is most naturally given to elaborate visual expression. It is, I believe, one of the most inherently cinematic forms of movie ever created, as what is hidden within must be, somehow, visually depicted on the screen using often extreme and fantastic schemes.
 

Fate - the Ultimate Deliverer

In M, the murderer is hunted down and trapped like a rat by the denizens of the underworld. He is utterly lost and helpless in their secret, dark and abandoned labyrinthine environment, and despite all his hiding and desperate struggle, he is caught and carried away to their underground abode. Here, he is to be tried and judged by the criminals themselves, who have supplanted the legal authorities and set themselves up to be both his judges and executioners.

What follows is one of the most horrific and shocking scenes ever put on the screen. Hans Beckert, the child-murderer (played to wide-eyed perfection by the great Peter Lorre) delivers his terrified and pathetic defense. While his accusers are ordinary criminals and therefore choose the laws that they will break, he - Beckert - is not free to follow either his conscience or his will. He kills, in short, because he must! In one of the most convincing scenes of pure hysteria ever recorded, Beckert shouts out that he is also a victim:

 

 

Where can there be justice if Beckert’s protestations are indeed true? Many would argue that compulsion is no excuse for a crime, but whether one ultimately feels sympathy or revulsion for the killer, he is quite convincing in his expression of his own pain and aguish.
Later film noir anti-heroes will be inextricably led, like a character in a Dostoevsky novel, to commit a crime or at the very least, to perform some idiotic blunder that will ultimately bring about their ruin. Like Hans Beckert, many of these people will be shown to act it such a way that they seemingly can’t avoid. They somehow get sucked into a whirlpool of evil, swept along either by a compulsion - often love for a beautiful but deadly woman - or by what seems like a general malaise that is in fact the very structure of the worlds they inhabit.

Ultimately, whether the faults lie within themselves or with a distortion they cannot help but being blinded by, it seems that from many a pictures’ very beginning, the chief character is doomed. And that is because the world around them is doomed - completely fallen and corrupt. How can one small person survive in such odds, when the entire environment is corrupt to the core? How can a person help but go down the drain when they live in a vast sewer?

Incomprehensibility: The Final Truth

There is no real catharsis in film noir. Good does not triumph over evil. Evil triumphs over evil. In M, Hans Beckert is saved from the mob by the police, and is brought into a courtroom where his crimes are judged by the law.

But what difference does it make? We do not even get to hear the sentence pronounced. Instead Lang cuts to a shot of three weeping, grieving mothers sitting in the courtroom. One of them weeps, "This won’t bring our children back!"

And it won’t. Once again, the archetype is set up in this classic picture for what will eventually become the moral of all films noir: that there is no moral. Rather, life is random, chaotic, cruel and ultimately meaningless.

Perhaps I should not say it is "meaningless." Often, true meaning - positive values, happiness, and even human goodness are ultimately affirmed. But they are denied to the hapless victims at the center of the struggle.

Once again, it is like the madness of the battlefield. One can go on and make all of the patriotic declarations and statements of need one wants - still, when it comes to the actual experience, it is pure chaos and hell, and nothing on earth can seem to explain it or justify it.

On the eve of the Nazi takeover, one must ultimately wonder what a relentless picture like M spoke to the soul of the average German viewer. And what, indeed, did nearly 20 years of relentless, fatalistic film noirs say to the shattered inner innocence of the brave American men who had experienced the unspeakable, and were now doomed to a life of silence about the entire affair?

It is, indeed, difficult to say. But we plan to look at films noirs. Lots of them. And we’re going to keep our eyes open for the savage subtexts that may very well be lurking underneath. For in the final analysis, it just may be that the triumph of fate, of the void - call it what you will - just might be the thing to soothe a mortal soul suffering in the quiet and buried world of confused agony and guilt.