M -- 1931 -- NR

Germany's first talkie from 1931 stars Peter Lorre as a serial child killer with Fritz Lang (one of the top German film directors of the time) at the helm. Naturally, I was watching it with subtitles which didn't help the experience, but overall, the film is paced well and told a solid serial killer thriller.

It has a lot of good points. The relation between the police and the crime underworld, for example was wonderfully done with simultaneous, intercut meeting between the two organizations. The police ar becoming a laughingstock having not cuaght the killer for 8 months, but the crime syndicates are getting walled in by the police raids looking for the killer which hurts their "business." Both groups set out to catch the killer at the same time. The police take the more cerebral route of looking for psychological profiles, while the underground just hires beggars to watch every child in town. Both group find him at about the same time, but while the cops wait at his house, the underground captures him and holds him on "trial."

It is this trial that makes a statement about justice and the criminal justice system. It says that a criminal is safer in the system than with regular people, a fact that is all too often painfully clear. No matter what the crime or how unfair or how brutal that crime was, the system always endeavors to treat the criminal with respect and dignity. 

The biggest weakness, in my opinion, was an attempt to bring sympathy for the killer during this trial. This attempt was completely in vain since a guy who kills children will rarely gain sympathy of any kind, no matter how fictional the story. Another problem this script had was a lack of familiarity with the characters. A lot of characters were introduced throughout the film and only a handful managed to get names. We got some knowledge of some of them, but most of the characters remained 2 dimensional cutouts of cops or crimelords.

The only confusion was some sort of cerebral tag on the ending that made no sense in context with the rest of the film. I don't know what that was.