M (F. Lang)

The film’s true center is the murderer himself. Peter Lorre portrays him incomparably as a somewhat infantile petty bourgeois who eats apples on the street and could not possibly be suspected of killing a fly. He is fat and looks effeminate rather than resolute. A brilliant pictorial device serves to characterize his morbid propensities. On three different occasions, scores of inanimate objects surround the murderer; they seem on the point of engulfing him. Standing before a cutlery shop, he is photographed in such a way that his face appears within a rhomboid reflection of sparkling knives. M confirms the moral of Sternbergs THE BLUE ANGEL: that in the wake of retrogression terrible outbursts of sadism are inevitable. (Siegfried Kracauer)