When I was growing up in Zurich, I remember seeing on Swiss TV a film called “M”, by the great German director, Fritz Lang, before he went to Hollywood. I was about 12 at the time. The film is about a pederast and child murderer, played by the spooky Peter Lorre. The opening of “M” is more terrifying than anything Alfred Hitchcock ever came up with. Do yourself a favor and see it.

This Lang film was approved by the German censors in 1931, two years before Hitler came to power, during the final disintegrating years of the Weimar Republic. The version I saw as a child was tightly edited around the the tale of the mass murderer. But heavily cut by censors at the time, down to 97 minutes, Dutch and Swiss film archivists have recently restored “M” to Lang’s original intent.

I just saw the film again and it took my breath away. This longer version is clearly a film about a crime so heinous that a disintegrating society can’t cope with it – it is beyond the institutions of civilized society. The good burghers’ mass hysteria in the shadow of these horrible crimes – and Lorre’s oddly touching confession about being unable to outrun his mass murdering “voices” – appears to me now as a prescient foreshadowing of the terror reign to come two years after this film hit the screens.

I think “M” is one of the great films of the 20th century, in some way predicting the Third Reich and “polite” German society’s contribution to the crimes committed, just like Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, with its aristocratic Europeans rotting from the inside out with the ravages of TB, symbolically captured Europe on the eve of World War I.

Here is a youtube taster of Fritz Lang’s great film.