directed by Fritz Lang
written by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang

Criterion #30. Hey, 30!

30. The commentary is annoying. It’s two academics, one of whom continually babbles the very worst sort of aca-double-talk, and the other of whom basically says “ibid.” It just so happens that I took a distribution requirement course from this very same double-talker back at Large University — my only official dip into Film Studies. I’ve said this about other commentaries but of course this time it was especially true: the bullshit brought me back. This stuff serves an important role in preventing me from judging my past self harshly. Why couldn’t I have been more engaged, retained more, taken school more seriously? I’ll tell you why: because they talked like this.

29. When did it become standard for insecure academic bullshit artists to tart up their circuities and truisms with meaningless, weak-blooded wordplay? A la “in this dialectic, to interrogate is to derogate, so to say.” (Or “Dis/course is stupid, I wish I hadn’t taken it.” Joke.) By the time of my graze with the Academy, this sort of thing seemed well entrenched, at least on the “Theory” side of things. I (we) always rolled our eyes at it as though it were a new sort of inane fad but I now wonder if it wasn’t already decades old. Someone somewhere was originally responsible for this, and someone nearby was responsible for endorsing it. I am disgusted with them both. (But in this dialectic, is not disgust a disguise, so to say?)

28. Anyway, the guy does a bit of that, and he certainly did it back in the day. But mostly what he does is say dull things (or semi-things) of dubious validity in an evasively longwinded way. Beth said the commentary lowered her opinion of Large University. Well then, that needed to happen.

27. Fritz Lang’s immortal film M has no musical score whatsoever, which throws a mini-wrench in my mini-works. How am I supposed to come up with a track for my megamix? Well, I did what I could, see below. But first let me address the issue of the no music. This is Lang’s first sound film. He apparently strongly resisted sound for a year and a half, and then wrapped his head around it and made this. The use of sound here is aggressive and purposeful. Off-screen sound effects are used very overtly to create a sense of space, or to create a sense of a modern city where e.g. car horns punctuate conversations. Harsh screeches and whistles are used to jar us in moments when the characters feel jarred. Peter Lorre as the killer is marked by his whistling, off-screen and on. And most notably, several sequences play in absolute silence. This is a very peculiar and stark effect that feels almost unique to this movie. The only other “completely silent” scene I can think of is the mirror sequence from Duck Soup. Anyone else?

28. But: one of the many extras on the disc is a gallery of still images, among which is something called “original German program” from the UFA-Palast am Zoo, the theater where the film premiered. Above the cast list it announces: “Vorspiel zu dem Film: ‘M’ / An der Wurlitzer Orgel: Billy Barnes”. Then follows the credits of the film (which incidentally do not appear in the film itself.) What this makes clear is that Billy Barnes (an American, oddly enough) played an organ prelude before the movie, as was common in the days of the silents. What it leaves ambiguous is whether or not he continued playing during the movie, which was, of course, also common it the days of the silents. It seems entirely plausible to me that in the earliest days of sound, a filmmaker might have assumed that music would always be performed live, and that the synchronized soundtrack was just for dialogue and diegetic effects. This, I thought, would certainly make sense of the silent sequences in M, which are generally scenes of suspense or of scale, both of which are occasions where films tend to lean more heavily on music. This train of speculation appealed to me.

27. However, after some Google-research I can’t find any mention of the notion of an accompanied M at all. A moderately strong case against my speculation about an organ score is the fact that M has been shown with no music for many decades, during which time Fritz Lang and others (e.g. the editor Paul Falkenberg, who is heard on the disc making commentary during a screening in the 70s) had plenty of opportunity to protest, to remind the world that musical accompaniment had been assumed. Seeing as they seem never to have done this, I guess it’s unlikely. On the other hand, the excellent through-composed original score for Metropolis simply disappeared from use for many decades even though its existence was no great secret, and Lang seems not to have protested that either. So I have to wonder whether this simply was a matter where nobody cared enough, and whether Lang, a notorious self-revisionist, didn’t mind getting credit for the very bold effect the silence happens to produce in the absence of music.

26. All I’m saying is, next time you watch M, try imagining that it is designed to accommodate live music, and tell me whether not it seems feasible to you. It does to me.

25. What then are we going to put on our all-Criterion soundtrack album? I’m afraid it has to be this, obviously the “theme” of M if there is one: Track 30. Trivia from the disc: Lorre couldn’t whistle, so this is the writer (Lang’s wife and collaborator) Thea von Harbou dubbing him. The disc also shows that later re-edited reissues of the movie with credits added accompanied them with an orchestral version of “Hall of the Mountain King.” It’s not at all appropriate for the film as a whole but it’s nonetheless the only real choice.

24. Having reached 30 tracks and (by my calculations) 70 minutes of music, I’m declaring disc 1 of this soundtrack mix complete. Time to burn it and get ready for disc 2.

23. I know, there are no discs anymore, but these gargantuan playlists you can buy online now with many hundreds of tracks give me a little bit of an agoraphobic feeling. It’s good for things to be bounded.

22. For your convenience, and to encourage actual relistening:

1.	Grand Illusion (1937)	Main Title	Joseph Kosma	1:59
2.	Seven Samurai (1954)	Intermission	Fumio Hayasaka	5:22
3.	The Lady Vanishes (1938)	Complete	Charles Williams	3:25
4.	Amarcord (1973)	Main Title	Nino Rota	2:24
5.	The 400 Blows (1959)	Main Title	Jean Constantin	2:51
6.	Beauty and the Beast (1946)	Main Title	Georges Auric	2:17
7.	A Night to Remember (1958)	Main Title	William Alwyn	2:32
8.	The Killer (1989)	Main Title	Lowell Lo	1:55
9.	Hard Boiled (1992)	End Credits	Michael Gibbs	1:36
10.	Walkabout (1971)	“Back to Nature”	John Barry	3:50
11.	The Seventh Seal (1957)	Main Title	Erik Nordgren	0:30
12.	This is Spinal Tap (1984)	“Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight”	Michael McKean	1:24
13.	The Silence of the Lambs (1991)	End Credits	Howard Shore	4:34
14.	Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto (1954)	Main Title/Finale	Ikuma Dan	1:51
15.	Samurai II: Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1955)	Main Title	Ikuma Dan	2:16
16.	Samurai III: Duel at Ganryu Island (1956)	Main Title	Ikuma Dan	1:53
17.	Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1976)	Main Title	Ennio Morricone	2:53
18.	The Naked Kiss (1964)	Main Title	Paul Dunlap	1:31
19.	Shock Corridor (1963)	Main Title	Paul Dunlap	1:13
20.	Sid and Nancy (1986)	“Garbage Kills”	Dan Wool	1:20
21.	Dead Ringers (1988)	Main Title	Howard Shore	2:14
22.	Summertime (1955)	Exit Music	Alessandro Cicognini	0:34
23.	RoboCop (1987)	End Credits	Basil Poledouris	6:12
24.	High and Low (1963)	Main Title	Masaru Sato	2:05
25.	Alphaville (1965)	“La ville inhumaine”	Paul Misraki	1:28
26.	The Long Good Friday (1979)	Main Title	Francis Monkman	1:34
27.	Flesh for Frankenstein (1973)	Main Title	Claudio Gizzi	2:24
28.	Blood for Dracula (1974)	Main Title	Claudio Gizzi	3:05
29.	Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975)	“The Ascent Music”	Bruce Smeaton	2:40
30.	M (1931)	[“Peer Gynt”]	[Edvard Grieg]	0:45

My top marks so far would go to:

4. Amarcord
5. The 400 Blows
10. Walkabout
20. Sid and Nancy
21. Dead Ringers
25. Alphaville
26. The Long Good Friday

And maybe a few more. Movie music is fun.

22. This was my first in my Criterion project that I watched on Blu-ray. Yes, high definition is definitely better than not. But here’s something I’ve only just now learned: getting a screenshot of a DVD menu is no problem, but getting a screenshot of a Blu-ray menu is a pain in the ass. Blu-ray menus are programmed in some kind of Java variant and are not currently fully implemented in any free software. When you play the disc you just see the background video loop with no visible menus. And the commercial software players never want to let you take screenshots. I struggled for a while and then just ended up grabbing the above menu image from dvdbeaver, who seem to have figured out how to do it. I assure you it looked exactly like that on my copy too.

21. Pretty interesting, right?

20. Apart from the commentary criticized above, the supplemental features are great. The jewel is William Friedkin’s filmed 1974 interview with Lang. There’s also the aforementioned Paul Falkenberg audio, recorded at the New School in the mid-70s, which is genuinely interesting — part of the pleasure being hearing the New Yorky voices of the students and imagining the whole milieu. Then there’s a sort of “sweding” of M by Claude Chabrol for TV in the 80s, followed by an interview in which he talks about the experience and about Lang’s technique. While not much to watch, this “remake” turned out to be really helpful to me in seeing the film as others have seen it, in all its iconic splendor. In picking the shots he wanted to remake, and inevitably exaggerating some aspects and disregarding others, Chabrol showed me what M is, not in itself, but in the culture and in people’s impressions, which is ultimately maybe of more interest. Or at least of separate and equal interest. It was almost as good as seeing a bit of it parodied in Looney Tunes or on The Simpsons.

19. There’s also a featurette about the “physical history” of the film, the ways it was recut, remade, lost, misused, and then misrestored. Leading, it is implied, up to this newly ideal version, from 2004.

18. Except! I actually saw M in the theater just a week before sitting down with the Criterion disc, because it’s now in distribution in a new and improved restoration that apparently is 7 minutes longer, reincorporating material not seen since 1931, etc. etc. I racked my brains on watching the Criterion disc to try to remember what else had been in the new version but couldn’t. I think maybe there was a little more to the scene where people on the street harass an innocent old man, but that’s all I can come up with. However I did have the impression of the image having been even cleaner and more stable in the new restoration. A tough thing to hold in the memory accurately and compare.

17. Seeing it with a live audience was interesting, though. All the tenser and stranger when it would go dead silent.

16. I like this countdown thing I’m doing, because it shows me when I’m going to be done.

15. But 30 was clearly too many.

14. Am I right, folks?

13. So, M.

12. Stephen Dedalus thinking back on his adolescent ambitions: “Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? Yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W.”

11. You’d think Sesame Street would have jumped at this one. (Except for the pedophile/murderer thing.) But come on, this movie really is brought to you by the letter M! I guess they never did The Scarlet Letter either. (Or The Story of O.) So many missed opportunities.

10. This is a very peculiar movie. As Chabrol’s riff made clear, its great impact was visual and atmospheric; it’s basically the founding document of film noir. Trench-coated underworlders slinking down shadowy streets! But looking back at it from our post-Raymond Chandler perspective, what stands out is just how little it actually conforms to those expectations. It’s just not really one of those movies. It’s actually a free improvisation on an “issue” movie, the issue being, well, serial child murder. (And more generally, child safety.) There had been several well-publicized murder sprees in Germany in the late 20s, so this was a highly topical sort of luridness. From this theme Lang basically spins off a meandering, ambivalent portrait of society and the ways it flails about trying to rid itself of a madman.

9. The thing that makes it so peculiar is that nearly every character in the society except for the murderer is depicted with a certain degree of playful cynicism. (As for example the hilarious shot of the head detective’s bulging crotch as he slouches sweatily in his chair.) But Peter Lorre’s character is, apparently, too troubled and weird and compelling to require any such commentary from the camera. The upshot is that the murderer comes off as being handled with greater sympathy than the world around him, even as it’s clear that his crimes are absolutely evil. This gives the strange impression that overlaid on this story about a society trying to cure its ills is another kind of story, the kind that’s usually about an artist, an outsider who lives in a way that is spiritually beyond those around him.

8. The uneasy juxtaposition of these two molds for the “outsider” story is essentially what Lolita plays on: the full, sensitive soul who feels misunderstood by a vapid world might well be a really horrible creep. Hans Beckert, the murderer here, is hardly a “full sensitive soul,” but his emotions are deeper and his psychology more layered than anyone else in this movie. The scene where he sadly makes a monster face at himself in the mirror establishes him as self-aware in a way nobody else in this world is. And his shrieking monologue at the end is chilling in part simply because it’s about psychology, and who would have thought anyone would dare “go there” in this sort of movie?

7. The philosophical effect at the end is excellent — you get drawn into the debate (“How do you solve a problem like M?”), become convinced that it is indeed an ugly and difficult subject with no satisfying answer, and feel temporarily relieved when it gets turned over to THE LAW. And just as that relief wears off, seconds later (“Wait, what is the law going to say?”), the movie swerves away and leaves you stuck there with an accusing finger pointed at you: you shall get no relief. There is no ultimate relief and no ultimate authority in this business of being a society. You have to live by what you believe, all the time.

6. And yet there are also long passages of the movie that don’t have much to do with the big message, with noir, with anything. It just gets caught up in its own goofy plotting. Why does the scene where the criminals are discussing plans have to go on and on? What are we supposed to make of the extent and duration of the sequence where the entire criminal underworld trashes an office building in search of the murderer?

5. As with some other very early sound films, the versions for foreign distribution actually involved some reshoots. The disc contains “the English version,” only recently rediscovered, which is very shoddily done and which I’ll admit I didn’t watch all the way through. It’s mostly just a cloddish dub, with a few replacement shots of printed text and a few dialogue scenes of the police redone with terrible actors. The only real reason anyone would want to watch it is that it features Peter Lorre himself doing his monologue at the end in English. But it’s clear that he’s in a completely different frame of mind on a different day, that Lang isn’t present, and that he’s just phoning it in, if not downright sabotaging it. He also did it in French, which you can watch in one of the extras. Similarly low-energy.

4. Four left, huh?

3. For all that I’m saying it’s an unusual movie and I don’t entirely know what to make of it, it’s very clear why it’s a renowned classic. It has force. You feel Lang’s complete control and cinematic sense of purpose in every shot. That a movie shot this way is eccentric in substance just makes it all the richer for rewatching. This is the stuff Film Studies are made of.

2. I’m not necessarily endorsing that. I also like films that do one thing, excellently. In fact I think I prefer them. Who needs a rich text when you can go to the movies?

1. But I did enjoy this.

0. Done.