lawcrossing01 Oh my gosh, what a cheesy scene with the mock lawyer defending the accused against the mobsters and the angry parents. Nothing but shallow, trite, over-emotional, characterizations designed to alarm the audience. Subtly and sophistication ? Not at all. Why have meaningful ideas when the characters can just yell well-worn slogans. Do you like being provoked for the sake of being provoked? If yes then you will love this movie. Absolutely nothing is believable about this movie.

Robert J. Maxwell One of the difficult things about shooting a movie in Los Angeles is that the city itself seems so dull. Every vista looks flat and tends to fall into one or another of two types. There are the wide car-choked boulevards with used car lots and Chinese restaurants, or there are the sterile, empty residential areas of trimmed lawns and ranch houses. Fast food dispensaries proudly proclaim, "Serving the Public Since 2009." There is no downtown. Some films manage to overcome this disadvantage. "Chinatown" was one. This one partially succeeds. The urban setting here has a texture to it. Not just the familiar Bradbury Building (in which Neff tried to outwit Keyes) or the Santa Monica pier but hills with steps, and multilayered wooden apartments, and corner candy stores. The location scout should get a screen credit.Few remakes live up to the original, even if the remake was directed by a young Joseph Losey. It's pretty thoroughly Americanized. In the original, Peter Lorre was the helpless child killer. Here, David Wayne is driven by ego-alien impulses too but Lang gave Lorre no facile excuse, whereas this script has Wayne hating his mother and taking his rage out on little girls. He was probably abused as a child. That accounts for all rudeness these days, doesn't it? Lang's treatment is both less sentimental and more in line with what psychologists know about serial killers, which is virtually nothing. Not all the changes are dumb. Instead of being trapped in the wooden bin of a warehouse, Wayne (and a kidnapped girl) are stuck in a room jammed with plastic mannequins and the air is full of legs dangling as if recently severed. What really freaks me about those mannequins is that their feet are shaped into smooth wedges but they have no toes.I don't think I'll go farther into the plot. Wayne is hauled up before "a jury of his peers" and defended by a drunk but I can't discuss the case out of court.Wayne has a heavy duty speech at his mock trial. The camera doesn't cut away from him for a long while. And he handles it pretty well -- not like Lorre, whose only justification is that he's in the grip of his obsession, but equally pathetic.In general, Lang's is the better film because, for one thing, it was an original, not a remake. For another, the agency of social control was Berlin's horde of beggars and small-time thieves in 1931 who formed a convincing network. Losey's movie loses that sense of solidarity and tries to being together too disparate a group: juvenile delinquents, rich racketeers, a black shoe shine boy. And Lang's depiction of police procedure is more explicit and more interesting. This version looks like a gangster movie.On his hunting trips, Lorre whistled a piece from Grieg's "Peer Gynt", "In the Hall of the Mountain King," which was both catchy and a little ominous. Here, David Wayne plays a lugubrious tune in a minor key on a flute, bespeaking utter misery and impending doom. The overall effect of these and other modifications is just to simplify the story by reducing, or eliminating, the ambiguity. Everything is spelled out for the viewer, as in a kindergarten class where the ABCs are being taught.

Bard-8 I can't understand someone not understanding this film, or considering it as anything less than masterful. I saw it on the big screen, and it left me, like its more illustrious predecessor, profoundly disturbed. In fact, David Wayne's "M" is more frightening than Peter Lorre's--Lorre was a brilliant actor, but his rather idiosyncratic appearance makes it easy to tag him as a "monster", and it typecast him as a perverse (and fascinating!) villain for most of his career. David Wayne not only turns in an harrowing and sympathetic (!) performance in this underrated masterpiece, but he does it with a face as bland and Midwestern as Wonder Bread. His casting, and Losey's change of locale and lighting to working class, sun-drenched and sun-faded shots of L.A., make the crimes and the criminal too believable, too naturalistic for comfort. Murder is more frightening in broad daylight than in shadows, where we've been taught to expect it. There are outstanding moments here: Losey's double-coded messages about the female body (the mannequin scene), which--despite lines inserted to please the censors--indicate that sex is behind the child-murders, the incredible hunt in the wonderful Bradbury Building, even a few comedic one liners (when the hapless police force shake up a low-class joint, and they ask the patrons what they're doing in the place, a bum replies, "Slummin'!") But it is the conclusion, the gut-wrenching final "courtroom" scene with David Wayne giving the most realistic, disturbing and moving portrait of psychopathy on the screen, that cements this film as a classic worthy of standing up to its predecessor. And when his "lawyer" questions the mob--and himself, and the viewers--as to who was truly responsible for this man and his evil, the answer is always disturbing. Losey believed that "it takes a village" fifty years ago, and his "M" remains a brand-hot indictment of a corrupt and money-hungry, perverse and puritanical, escapist and scapegoating society.

Erewhon Seymour Nebenzal didn't have an especially illustrious career as a producer, either in Europe or the United States. Two of his American movies, in fact, SIREN OF ATLANTIS and this one, were remakes of movies he had produced in Europe. But in this case, he hired the right director. Was it the growing Blacklist that resulted in this movie having no writing credits on screen? Perhaps, but also perhaps not, as the soon-to-be-blacklisted Howard da Silva and Joseph Losey both use their own names. Losey and his team make excellent use of numerous Los Angeles locations, including Angel's Flight, Bunker Hill, the Bradbury Building (which is identified by name and location) and what seems to be that old amusement park in Long Beach, although what's seen here could be Venice. David Wayne is fine as the disturbed child killer, and delivers the required final act speech very well. But he doesn't have the power and poetry of Lorre's performance--but then who in Hollywood in 1951 would have? The movie still has some of the comedy of Lang's original, but it's not as dry and sardonic, and there isn't as much of it. The score isn't good, and shoves the movie even more firmly in the direction of the melodrama it keeps threatening to become. The very last shot is oddly theatrical in a literal sense: it looks like it is being performed on a stage. And I'm not sure what the point of the drunken lawyer trying to grasp a bit of his former glory really was. However, this element merely weakens the film, it doesn't destroy it. No, this isn't as good as Lang's original, but Lang's original is perhaps the best film of a great director. It's a classic in almost every regard. This version of "M" is an interesting and largely successful attempt at adapting the themes and ideas of the original to Los Angeles, and to 1950s Hollywood. Naturally there are some weaknesses, but the movie is brisk and engrossing, and certainly doesn't deserve the obscurity into which it has fallen. Some condemn the film merely for being a remake, but remakes have always been a large part of movie history. There's little reason to object to them, especially now that the original films tend to be available on video. (In the 1930s-50s, originals were generally withdrawn.) If the remake is good, then hooray, there are now two good movies on the subject. If it's bad, then the remake will soon be forgotten.