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13 Fascinating Rhythms M It’s unthinkable that a better movie will come along this year [1997] than Fritz Lang’s breathtaking M (1931), his first sound picture, showing this week in a beautifully, if only partially, restored version at the Music Box. (The original was 117 minutes, and this one is 105—though until the invaluable restoration work of the Munich Film Archives, most of the available versions were only 98 minutes.) Shot in only six weeks, it’s the best of all serial-killer movies—a dubious thriller subgenre after Lang and three of his disciples, Jacques Tourneur (The Leopard Man, 1943), Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, 1960), and Michael Powell (Peeping Tom, 1960), abandoned it. M is also a masterpiece structured with the kind of perfection that calls to mind both poetry and architecture and that makes even his disciples’ classics seem minor by comparison. M came at a privileged juncture in history—the period when silent movies were giving way to talkies, dividing the art of cinema into two distinct kinds of narrative flow: the flow of images, intertitles, and music that achieved a kind of apotheosis in the late 20s and early 30s in pictures such as Dovzhenko’s Earth, Lang’s Spione, Murnau’s Sunrise, Vidor’s The Crowd, Chaplin’s City Lights, Sternberg’s The Docks of New York, and Stroheim ’s unfinished Queen Kelly; and the flow of dialogue, narration, music, and sound effects that carried images along like uprooted trees and houses in a flood. Like only a few other pictures in this exciting transitional period—Dreyer’s Vampyr , Ozu’s The Only Son, Sternberg’s Thunderbolt and The Blue Angel, and Dovzhenko’s Ivan are the first that come to mind—M draws mightily on both of these powerful strains, picking and choosing from the best of both. Building its story on visual rhymes that are carried by dialogue that periodically turns into offscreen narration, and fusing the two great traditions of silent film—montage/ editing and camera movement / mise en scène—this astonishing movie represents an unsurpassed grand synthesis of storytelling. Lang himself correctly maintained to the end of his life that M was his best film—not so much for its formal beauty as for the social analysis that its form articulates. (In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 Contempt—another restoration that will open at the Music Box a month from now, in which Fritz Lang plays himself— this point is underlined when he first meets Brigitte Bardot’s character, who expresses enthusiasm for his western Rancho Notorious; Lang graciously replies, 14 ESSENTIAL CINEMA ‘‘I prefer M.’’) He also, according to film historian and programmer David Overbey (who knew him during his last years), tended to change the subject or grouse whenever the name Orson Welles came up. It’s an understandable reaction; in spite of all the pages wasted on the alleged influence of Stagecoach or The Power and the Glory on Citizen Kane, M is clearly—visibly and audibly—the major predecessor of that movie’s low and high angles, its baroque and shadowy compositions , its supple and wide-ranging camera movements, its tricky sound and dialogue transitions, and above all its special rhythmic capacity to tell a ‘‘detective story’’ by turning most of its characters into members of a chorus, delineating a social milieu and penetrating a dark mystery at the same time. (Welles claimed never to have seen any of Lang’s German work when he started making movies, and many of his stylistic moves surely emerged from his theater and radio work. But it would be difficult to look at Citizen Kane again without thinking of M repeatedly.) I’m still inching my way through Patrick McGilligan’s recently published, 548page Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, but it’s already apparent that this first posthumous biography of Lang follows pretty much the same kitchen-sink principle as Frank Brady’s Citizen Welles: it’s both spotty as scholarship and invaluable as a treasury of sources and suppositions. McGilligan doesn’t know German and is often sloppy when it comes to making attributions, but he has the merit of being candid about his uncertainties—most of them compounded by Lang’s lifelong talent for embroidery and mythmaking. So this isn’t a work of solipsistic indulgence or spiteful invention, like David Thomson’s recent execrable Welles biography , Rosebud, and it’s a better read than Todd McCarthy’s Howard Hawks...

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