Week #10: Released in 1931, directed by Fritz Lang, 109 minutes. New to me!

LetterBoxd Score: 5 stars

Fritz does it again! The silent era ends, and we’re in the world of sound now (with a few exceptions).

I went in expecting this to be a taught police procedural about catching a serial killer. The kind of thing famous for laying down tracks that others would follow. Sounds great, but maybe the kind of thing might feel a bit familiar after 92 years of copycats.

But no, this is much more singular and strange and compelling. We do have our serial killer, and that’s all done well. And in fact, we do have something like a procedural; but it goes off the rails. In fact, this is a society where the police are powerless to find the serial killer of children. All they can do is engage in some security theater, disrupting the lives of the criminal underworld. It is this criminal underworld that decides to catch the murderer, to get the police off their backs.

But that’s only the first twist! Once they succeed in capturing him, using a network of beggar informants, there is this scene that made me sit up right: the captured killer, insisting on his innocence and trying escape an abandoned factory, suddenly finds himself in an enormous room facing hundreds of criminals, staring at him coldly. Then begins a third act trial by the criminal underworld. The trial, and indeed the whole movie, ends ambiguously. We don’t know the killer’s fate, but as the mother speaking to the camera makes clear, it doesn’t really matter. The pain and loss cannot be repaired.

It’s a movie with a strange and spare soundtrack; it uses silence to draw attention to sounds, in the same way black and white draws attention to shapes. Peter Lorre’s performance is also fantastic, especially towards the end, when he gets a full courtroom scene, or a sort. Most of all, I am struck by how different this movie is from Metropolis: it’s not spectacle and stylized acting, but sparse realism.

Why would someone think it’s one of the ten greatest movies ever made?

It’s strange and unique; I haven’t seen anything else quite like it. The sound design is very good – interesting that it seems like it took a few years of playing with sound before we got a sound movie on this list. And this one didn’t really integrate sound seamlessly into the picture, in the modern way (there’s no music, but a lot of silence); it instead exists as a stand-alone type.

More broadly, this feels like a movie with something to say about evil and authority. But it’s also just really well put together.

Next week: L’Atalante