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M (1951 film)

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M
theatrical release poster
Directed byJoseph Losey
Screenplay by
  • Norman Reilly Raine
  • Leo Katcher
  • Waldo Salt (additional dialogue)
Produced bySeymour Nebenzal
Starring
CinematographyErnest Laszlo
Edited byEdward Mann
Music byMichel Michelet
Production
company
Superior Pictures
Distributed byColumbia Pictures
Release date
  • March 1951 (1951-03) (US)
Running time
88 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

M is a 1951 American film noir directed by Joseph Losey. It is a remake of Fritz Lang's 1931 German film of the same title about a child murderer. This version shifts the location of action from Berlin to Los Angeles and changes the killer's name from Hans Beckert to Martin W. Harrow. Both versions of M were produced by Seymour Nebenzal, whose son, Harold, was associate producer of the 1951 version.[1]

The 1951 film stars David Wayne, Howard da Silva, Luther Adler and Martin Gabel. ADD[2][3]

The film was restored in 2015, with Harold Nebenzal as Executive Producer of the restoration.

Plot

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Martin W. Harrow (David Wayne) is a compulsive child-murderer, and the public demands of the mayor and police that he be caught. The police start a crackdown on criminal operations, dive bars and hangouts in the city, hoping that the murderer will turn up in one of the many raids. This pressure is preventing the city's crime syndicate from doing business, and its boss, Marshall (Martin Gabel), organizes his forces to find and stop the murderer so that the police will stop the crackdown and Marshall can go back to business as usual. Meanwhile, Police Inspector Carney (Howard Da Silva) has a psychiatrist examining patients who have been released from mental hospitals as possible suspects.

At the same time that the police focus on Harrow, finding incriminating evidence—the shoes of the dead children—in his apartment, the criminals track him down with his intended next victim. They capture him, and place him on trial by his "peers" in the Los Angeles criminal underworld. Harrow makes an impassioned plea for his life, explaining that he is unable to stop himself from committing his unspeakable crimes. Just as he is about to be killed by the crowd, the police arrive to take him away, but not before Marshall has shot and killed his alcoholic lawyer, Dan Langley (Luther Adler).

Cast

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Cast notes:

Production

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“In a way my being blacklisted was one of best things that ever happened to me as a filmmaker. Otherwise I might have stayed on in Hollywood merely making money instead of making pictures I want to make. What could be worse than that.” - Joseph Losey interview with Gene D. Phillips, Journal of Popular Film (1976)[4]

Producer Seymour Nebenzel's Nero Films produced the original 1931 version of M directed by Fritz Lang, and Nebenzal retained the rights when he fled Nazi Germany and began to make films in Hollywood, primarily "B" pictures for major studios and low-budget independents. Nebenzal decided in 1950 to remake M, reset to Los Angeles—perhaps inspired by the anti-Communist mass hysteria then predominant in the country—and approached Lang about directing it, but Lang was appalled and outraged by the idea of anyone remaking a film he considered to be his masterpiece. Nebenzal then approached another expatriate German film director, Douglas Sirk, who also turned him down. Joseph Losey, however, took on the job, despite his being under suspicion of being a Communist by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee.[5] Losey registered discontent with Columbia Pictures’ financing of the film and the limitations placed on altering the structure of the Lang original. Denying that the film was merely a “remake,” Losey “regretted that he wasn’t able to make more extensive changes to the original.”[6]

Losey's casting included actors who were also under suspicion.[7] Losey would later leave the U.S. and settle in the UK to make films there, notably his collaborations with writer Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971).[8]

Robert Aldrich was Losey's assistant director on M.[8]

Locations

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The film was shot on location in downtown Los Angeles, including the now demolished Victorian neighborhood of Bunker Hill. David Wayne's character lived at an eccentric Victorian mansion on Bunker Hill Avenue known as the Max Heindel house because Heindel, a famous astrologer in the early 20th century, had once lived there. Some scenes were shot on and around the funicular Angels Flight on Third Street. The most spectacular footage occurs in a lengthy sequence shot inside the Bradbury Building on the southeast corner of Broadway and Third, a block east of Angels Flight. Losey used the basement, the distinctive stairways and balconies, and the roof of the building.

Reception

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When the film was released, an anonymous reviewer at Variety wrote: "David Wayne, as the killer of small children, is effective and convincing. Luther Adler, as a drunken lawyer member of a gangster mob, turns in an outstanding performance, as do Martin Gabel, the gang-leader, and Howard da Silva and Steve Brodie as police officials ... Joseph Losey's direction has captured the gruesome theme skilfully."[9] Wayne in particular received good reviews.[8]

Fritz Lang remarked that the release of the 1951 film earned his 1931 original the best reviews of his career.[8]

Censorship

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M was boycotted in some cities because of director Losey's political views.[7]

The film was classified by Ohio film censors as unacceptable for public screenings. At the end of 1953, the film's producers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in 1954, M was approved for exhibition in Ohio without any cuts.[10]

Comparison to Lang’s 1931 original

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Just as the rising threat of fascism in Germany informed director Fritz Lang’s 1931 original production, Losey’s treatment was influenced by the Red Scare and blacklist of the late 1940s and 1950s. In his M, a reactionary community proves itself “mercilessly efficient in exorcizing alien elements from its midst.”[11]

Film historian Foster Hirsch points to stylistic and thematic parallels between the two versions, but cautions that Losey may suffer from comparisons. Lang demonstrated “unsurpassed” cinematic control over his resources: “his M is the work of a film master.”[12] Losey’s remake was crafted when he was developing his talents, lacking the “experience and artistic freedom to compete with Lang.” Studio constraints limited Losey to making stylistic facsimile of the earlier film, and, “wasn’t permitted a truly original handling of the material.”[13] Nonetheless, similarities emerge:

Both directors are preoccupied with enclosure and entrapment; both share a deterministic world-view. A grim fate stalks Losey’s character as much as it does Lang’s. The meticulously preplanned mise-en-scène of both directors allows no space for the spontaneous, the accidental, or the fortuitous.[14]

Losey diverges sharply from Lang’s M in his conception of the pedophilic murderer. Peter Lorre’s diminutive “M” in the original is furtive, socially isolated and distinctly repellent. Losey’s sociopath, played by David Wayne, is by all appearances a well-adjusted Midwesterner. As such, he makes a favorable first impression on the local community.[15] Wayne’s confession and plea for psychiatric treatment suggests the possibility of redemption and pity from the community. Senses of Cinema’s Dan Callahan reports that “Wayne delivers this complex speech superbly (Losey reports that when he finished the cast and crew burst into applause.”[16]

Lorre’s “ecstatic” interpretation is reminiscent of characters from Greek mythology or Christian scripture, invoking “Orestes Pursued by the Furies, or Satan expelled from heaven and suffering the torments of hell.”[17]

See also

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Footnotes

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  1. ^ M at the TCM Movie Database.
  2. ^ Palmer and Riley, 1993 p. 157: Filmography
  3. ^ Hirsch, 1980 p. 40: On remake. And p. 233: Filmography
  4. ^ Palmer and Riley, 1993 p. 6: Quoted here. See JPF 5 no. 1, 1976, “Hollywood Exile: An Interview with Joseph Losey”
  5. ^ Callahan, 2002: “Losey hadn’t wanted to do a remake of Fritz Lang’s M (1931), but shaky finances forced him to accept the assignment.”
  6. ^ Hirsch, 1980 p. 40: Losey: “I was constantly embarrassed by the enforced reliance on the original.” And: See here for quotes from 1961 Sight and Sound interview and Cahiers du Cinema No. 111: Footnotes p. 226
  7. ^ a b Muller, Eddie (April 28, 2019) Intro to the Turner Classic Movies presentation of M
  8. ^ a b c d Muller, Eddie (April 28, 2019) Outro to the Turner Classic Movies presentation of M.
  9. ^ (31 December 1950). Variety film review (1951) Variety.
  10. ^ Staff (January 1, 1954). "High Court to See Two Banned Films / Appeals From Rulings on 'M' and 'La Ronde' Call States' Action Unconstitutional". The New York Times. Retrieved February 17, 2019.
  11. ^ Hirsch, 1980 p. 40-41: Lang’s M: “visual and political anticipations of Fascism.” And p. 42: “conformist community”
  12. ^ Hirsch, 1980 p. 42: “Losey’s film inevitably invites and suffers from comparison.”
  13. ^ Hirsch, 1980 p. 42
  14. ^ Hirsch, 1980 p. 42
  15. ^ Hirsch, 1980 p. 46: “more immediately sympathetic.”
  16. ^ Callahan, 2003: “A travesty should have resulted [from the choice of Wayne] instead a masterpiece came into being, slightly inferior to Lang’s version, but not by much.” And see footnote in Callahan for source of Losey remark.
  17. ^ Hirsch, 1980 p. 46

Sources

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