M Review

Lang had spent a decade perfecting silent film, and his first talkie is built on the discovery that sound is most powerful when withheld. A mother calls her daughter's name up an empty stairwell; the reply is a ball rolling out of the grass and a balloon caught in telephone wires. Nothing is shown and everything is stated. The whistled Grieg motif does work no image could, identifying Beckert offscreen, then betraying him to a blind balloon seller, then chalked onto his shoulder as a mark.

Fritz Arno Wagner shoots Berlin in overhead diagonals and deep shadow, and Lang cuts police conference to criminal conference on matching gestures, a montage argument that the underworld is simply a better organized bureaucracy. Peter Lorre's basement trial is the reason the film outlasts its influence, a compulsive pleading his own case with real terror, forcing an audience that has hunted him for ninety minutes into a position it did not want. The procedural passages run long by modern measure and the dialogue is often expository. The last line still closes like a door.