Weimar Republic – Crime Thriller – Year: 1931 – Running time: 111 mins
Audience feedback: Rating: 
(4.14 from 37 votes)
- ‘Excellent’: 17 votes
- ‘Very Good’: 10 votes
- ‘Good’: 4 votes
- ‘Satisfactory’: 4 votes
- ‘Poor’: 0 votes
- + 2 comments with no rating
‘M’ is the letter pressed on the shoulder of a notorious Berlin child-killer by the organised criminal underground, to identify and kill him: the city police manhunt is seriously inconveniencing the criminal classes. Peter Lorre is the porcine, pop-eyed serial killer Hans Beckert. One of the greatest examples of German expressionism and a gripping suspense thriller, also fascinating for its fetishisation of smoking: everyone has huge cigars, bulbous pipes and cigarette holders, as if smoke is the endless industrial by-product of the city’s folly, greed and shame.
Few films are gripping and effective [more than 80] years after their original release, but this one surely is.
Kenneth Turan (LA Times)
Director: Fritz Lang
Metropolis (1927) / The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933) / Fury (1936)
CFC Film notes (ed. Jon Wisbey)
Audience feedback
Discussion forum for “M”
Selected UK reviews
The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw)
Little White Lies (David Jenkins)
Theatrical Trailer: