"M"

With their usual flare for understatement, some critics called the director of M, Fritz Lang, "th greatest of the great." He certainly belongs in the company of brilliant German directors like Wiene, Pabst, and Marnau. In any case, amidst the stultifying holiday cheer, we figured that the best reason for going to the Brattle had little to do with directors--in M, we had heard, one could see Peter Lorre murder little girls.

It should be noted for those who are unfamiliar with this 1930 classic, that M tells the story of a child-killer eventually hunted down by the under-world itself. The famous final scene, in which Lorre confesses his crimes, is a true melodrama of the soul. And the initiates to the film should watch out for the use of asynchronous sound or counterpoint, the brilliant use of incidental music as an active dramatic element, and the melodramatic use of space, especially in long shots from above.

Still, we were interested in gore. Though M just couldn't match the exhilarating poor taste of the murder scenes of Charade, still we could hope. After all, in a 1928 film the Spanish director Bunuel managed an extreme closeup of a razor slicing an eyeball. But in M peeling an orange with a switchblade is the goriest Lorre ever gets.

Not easily daunted, we looked further for something of value. In a flash of insight, we achieved our final and greatest perception: M reveals the Lang-as-Mother-H a t e r-Sublimator syndrome The film, of course, is merely a post adolescent fantasy resolution of a protracted Oedipal dilemma. Killing little girls--so transparent it s embarassing.

Then we began to put clues together. Lang's Secret Behind the Door, a 1948 variation of the L-A-M-H-S syndrome: a poor fellow develops a terrible compulsion to--you guessed it--kill women (because he thought his mother didn't love him). In Metropolis (1927), a rebelling son goes into the bowels of the earth to join a saint-like young girl (mother?) who leads the down-trodden masses out of the bowels, almost.

And in 1936 there was a Lang film called Fury in which an innocent boy is suspected of abducting another little girl and almost gets hanged (from a tall tree?). Only in 1943 did Lang come close to solving his problem by acknowledging his intense mother love and symbolically murdering himself as his guilt feelings dictated. It was a film about a perfect heroine and it was entitled Hangman.

Though all our psychiatrist friends have been pressing to have this column published in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, a freshman who happened to look it over said with a sneer, I'll see M for myself."