◄ M (1931)
Trivia
The tune that Peter Lorre's character whistles is "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from the "Peer Gynt" suite by Edvard Grieg.
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Peter Lorre was Jewish and fled Germany in fear of Nazi persecution shortly after the movie's release. Fritz Lang, who was half Jewish, fled two years later.
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Contrary to popular belief, Fritz Lang did not change the title from "The Murderers are Among Us" to "M" due to fear of persecution by the Nazis. He changed the title during filming, influenced by the scene where one of the criminals writes the letter on his hand. Lang thought "M" was a more interesting title.
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Fritz Lang asserts that he cast real criminals for the court scene in the end. According to biographer Paul Jensen, 24 cast members were arrested during filming.
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Fritz Lang's cruelty to his actors was legendary. Peter Lorre was thrown down the stairs into the cellar over a dozen times. When Lang wanted to hire Lorre for Human Desire over two decades later, the actor refused.
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Chosen by the Association of German Cinémathèques as the most important German film of all times.
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MGM studio executive Irving Thalberg assembled his writers and directors for a private screening of this film, telling them that they needed to be making films of this power and caliber. He also admitted that if anyone had brought a story of a child killer to him, he would have rejected it.
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Director Fritz Lang made this film in an effort to claw back his artistic standing after the double failure of his two previous films, Metropolis and By Rocket to the Moon.
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Two German serial killers are mentioned in the film - Georg Karl Großman (believed to have killed up to 50 young women) and Fritz Haarmann (known as the Butcher of Hannover; killed at least 24 young men in Hannover).
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The Tegel Penitentiary in Berlin is Germany's largest prison with about 1,700 inmates (as of 2007).
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Alexanderplatz (the Alex) was the site of the headquarters of the Berlin Police Department.
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The film is supposedly based on the real-life case of serial killer Peter Kürten, called "The Vampire of Düsseldorf", whose crimes in the 1920s horrified Germany. However, director Fritz Lang has expressly denied that he drew any inspiration from the case. Nevertheless, he and his wife Thea von Harbou researched the crimes carefully, consulting with German police, visiting murder scenes, interviewing sex offenders in prison and even talking to detectives in Scotland Yard in London. According to Lang biographer Paul Jensen, the director spent eight days doing field research in a mental institution.
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Peter Lorre's character is introduced by the musical cue "In the Hall of the Mountain King" from Edvard Grieg's "Peer Gynt Suite No. 1". This was one of the very first times that a musical theme was used to signify a character, a technique borrowed from the world of opera that is now a staple of filmmaking.
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The film has a very sour vision of contemporary life in Germany. This is probably due to the fact that Fritz Lang - a Jew - was alarmed at the rapid rise of Nazism and that even his wife Thea von Harbou had become a party member.
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What convinced Fritz Lang to make the film was his reading of the last scene in the script, when a mother ominously warns, "You have to watch your children".
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The film was independently backed by an admirer of Fritz Lang who persuaded him to make another film when the director was thinking of giving it all up. Lang eventually agreed to make the film provided that he had no interference and had final cut.
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It was common practice at the time for foreign-language films to be concurrently shot in English, for the British and North American markets. Fritz Lang had nothing to do with the English-language version of his film.
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Josef Goebbels was said to have described the film as "fantastic, free of phony humanitarian sentiments".
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The film premiered in 1931. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party took power in 1933, and banned the film the next year. It was then stored in a vault, where it stayed for many years. Audiences didn't get the chance to see the film again until 1966. For its video release 30 years later, it underwent a restoration that included the addition of music and sound effects that wouldn't have been authorized by Fritz Lang (he deliberately kept certain passages quiet) and the cutting of certain scenes. The image had also been altered to fit the 4:3 screen size. These injustices were amended in 2009 for the film's Blu-ray release.
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Two-thirds of the film was shot with sound, the remaining third was shot silent. At the time the license fees for sound equipment were quite prohibitive, so this was a move to try to keep costs down. However, Fritz Lang liked the eerie, unnerving quality that arose from going from a sound world to one where there is no noise at all.
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Although he was thrilled to play such a major part, Peter Lorre came to hate it later as people tended to associate him with being a child murderer in real life.
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Peter Lorre couldn't whistle well so the whistling of "In the Hall of the Mountain King" heard in the film was actually done by Fritz Lang.
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This film, along with Costa-Gavras's Z and Tobias Lindholm's R holds the record for the shortest movie title in existence.
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The failure of the original copyright holder to renew the film's copyright resulted in it falling into public domain, meaning that virtually anyone could duplicate and sell a VHS/DVD copy of the film. Therefore, many of the versions of this film available on the market are either severely (and usually badly) edited and/or of extremely poor quality, having been duped from second- or third-generation (or more) copies of the film.
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