- As her mother chides the neighborhood children for singing about "the man in black", young Elsie Beckmann wanders home alone. She approaches a poster advertising a reward for the capture of the kindermorder, the man responsible for the disappearance of at least two sets of children. As Elsie plays with her ball, a man's silhouette slowly creeps into the scene. The unidentified stranger buys the young girl a balloon and whistles to himself while Mrs. Beckmann wonders why her daughter is so late. We see Elsie's ball rolling unaccompanied on the grass and her balloon caught on a telephone pole. Mrs. Beckmann yells for her daughter, but Elsie is gone.
- Fritz Lang's M, like Metropolis, is one of those films that reinvented the medium or, at the very least, dramatically improved it. Contained in this single work are the seeds of film noir, heist films, psychological thrillers, and even courtroom dramas. Although Hitchcock had made The Lodger a few years earlier, M features one of the earliest and most complex portrayals of that modern suspense film staple, the serial killer, played brilliantly by Peter Lorre. M has low-angle shots and cameras zooming in through windows ten years before Citizen Kane. It is one of the earliest films to use sound creatively, allowing the audience to hear a murderer's whistles and the clicking of a knife against a lock. On top of all of this, M is an absolute pleasure to watch.
- After Elsie's disappearance, the police, led by Inspector Lohmann (Otto Wernicke), try to uncover the child-killer by cracking down on the usual suspects. Instead, they uncover only an amusing collection of stolen goods (silverware was a hot commodity, apparently), irritating the criminal underworld in the process. To get the police off their backs, the black-gloved gangster Schranker (Gustaf Grundgens) proposes that the criminals use the beggar's union to try to find the murderer first. This approach succeeds when an unexpected witness recognizes the murderer and tips off an agent, who secretly brands the suspect with the film's title letter. In a marvelously creative and suspenseful set of scenes, the criminals corral the killer before breaking into and ransacking a building to capture him. Finally, the murderer is brought before a jury of his peers in a scene that simultaneously expresses real sympathy for Lorre's anguished killer and Lang's usual disdain for mob justice.
- Many of the great scenes in M (and there are several) are enhanced by Lang's skill at creating impressive and often strange juxtapositions. In the most famous example of this phenomenon, the film seamlessly cuts between shots of the criminals and the police as both groups discuss how to catch the murderer. The two organizations would claim to be completely antithetical, yet their methods (and poses, for that matter) look surprisingly similar. Likewise, the trial features a group of "expert(s) in the rule of law" who would not ordinarily survive the jury selection process, and there's probably no more incongruous construction than a group of criminals breaking into a building to catch another criminal. The murderer, too, is seen to struggle with his condition, quite unlike the callous monster he is supposed to be. Even small details, like the killer's knife being used to slice an orange, or the supposedly dead watchman gorging himself on sausages cleverly contrast expectations with reality. M probably would have been a great film without such details, but I think of them as the finishing strokes on Fritz Lang's masterpiece.
