M 1931 - A city is looking for a murderer

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022100/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
IMDB rating: 8,5

Director: Fritz Lang
Main Cast: Peter Lorre, Ellen Widmann, Inge Landgut, Otto Wernicke

"One of the most distinguished and technically accomplished early sound films, Fritz Lang's M revealed the expressive possibilities for combining sound and visuals, in a metaphorically loaded story about pre-Nazi Germany. Working from the true story of the Dusseldorf child murders, Lang matches a mother's anguished calls for her daughter with images of an empty stairwell and a lost balloon rather than show the killing, while the murderer's obsessive whistling becomes the calling card for his threatening presence. Beyond the use of sound, Lang takes a pessimistic view of German society, using editing to equate the police with the criminals, while Fritz Arno Wagner's fluid cinematography creates a gloomy night world of shadows and paranoid entrapment. Lang's documentary-like attention to the details of the search, combined with the absence of non-diegetic music, matches the stylization with an equally creepy element of realism. The killer may be sick, but the society pursuing him isn't that much better. A worldwide success and a star-maker for Peter Lorre (who is terrifyingly ordinary in the role of the murderer), M influenced movies from those of Orson Welles to the American film noir of the 1940s; Lang himself left Nazi Germany for Hollywood in 1933.
M is revealed as a true classic - a film that shames everything made in its genre since." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/m-v100745

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