So this is another Fritz Lang movie, but unlike Metropolis, this one is a talkie (his first, apparently). So the subject of it isn’t inherently fascinating — it’s about a serial killer who preys on children, and the efforts to catch him, and then his sentencing — but there are three things that make it more interesting than just being Yet Another Serial Killer Movie:

  1. The most obvious one is that being made in 1931 puts it squarely out of “Yet Another” contention. There’s apparently a strong argument that depending on how you look at a couple of earlier movies (that I haven’t seen), this might be the first serial killer movie ever. So when it shows the police using then-cutting-edge techniques like fingerprint matching and handwriting analysis to build a psychological profile, and delves into the motive behind the killer’s actions, it’s not just doing some tedious bullshit that’s been done a billion times before, it’s actually setting the template that will be followed by a pile of much shittier, more pointless movies later on.

  2. And then also there’s a weird twist to it, which is that it ends up not being the police that catch him, but a gang of criminals. Most of the late-middle of the movie is taken up by a chase/quasi-heist scene where those criminals try to capture the murderer (because while he’s roaming free, the police are cracking down in a way that’s bad for business); and his “trial” takes place underground in a pseudo-court run by the criminals, who end up in an argument about whether someone who is compelled to murder children should be killed (as he can’t control his compulsions, so will be dangerous as long as he’s alive) or given to the police to be hospitalized (as he’s not responsible for his actions). The trial is inconclusive, but this philosophical debate about the nature of evil ties into the next point.

  3. The movie was made in Germany in 1931, as the Nazi Party had not yet taken power but was in ascendance. (Lang was originally denied permission to shoot in a particular studio controlled by a Nazi-friendly owner, because he thought, on the basis of the original title, Murderer Among Us, that it was going to be anti-Nazi. I feel like that assumption alone should probably make you rethink your Nazi sympathies, tbh.) This movie isn’t really about Nazis in any direct way, but… you can feel the undertones. There are little things, like the hairstyles that are so obviously of that era in Germany; and there are big things, like the mob of criminals angrily shouting for the murderer to be killed for his actions, even as they themselves have killed people. It’s not really clear that Lang was even trying for anything intentionally allegorical here (unlike his next movie, which did have some deliberate anti-Nazi elements, apparently), but it’s certainly the case that the times he lived in ended up working their way into the film.

So this is apparently viewed as Lang’s masterpiece by a lot of critics, but put me with the S&S list in putting Metropolis solidly higher. M is a basically decent movie made something more by its historical context; Metropolis is an immediately brilliant film that transcends its context completely.