Greatly admired for the rigor of its construction, Fritz Lang's masterpiece is a terrifying excursion into an urban underworld where it is difficult to distinguish morally between the activities of organized crime and organized law enforcement. Peter Lorre gives his immortal performance as a pathetic child murderer pursued by both the law and the syndicate. One of the film's most innovative features is its highly expressive soundtrack. Lang stated in 1931, “Of course I adapted myself to the requirements of sound. For example, I discovered that when I sit at the terrace of a cafe, I no longer hear the sound of the street when I am engaged in a lively conversation. I realized that sound not only can be used as a dramatic element, but that is the way it should be used.” In M, music is limited to the Peer Gynt theme, which both torments the murderer and hauntingly announces his presence in place of the image. Off-screen dialogue accompanied by shadow images; sound overlapping scenes, binding one to the next; silences broken by the ticking of a clock, a police whistle or a mother's desperate shriek, are only a few of the ways in which sound and image are ingeniously fused to enhance the plot. Finally, it is a series of sounds which leads to the capture of the murderer, who says almost nothing until his final, despairing cry, “I can't help it!”
Our print is a 16mm print of superior sound and visual quality; based on a German copy, it contains several sequences not in previous prints, and is closer to the German version in the order of its sequences.