Completed in 1931 by Fritz (Metropolis) Lang, this seminal German sound film, Lang's first tryst with sound in movies, deals with the theme of a town terrorized by the menace of a homicidal sex offender that targets children; despite the film-maker's denial the events of the film seem to take at least some inspiration from the mass terror unleashed by the Vampire of Dusseldorf. It is somewhat ironic that while the treatment of violence and horror in films has grown more up-front and explicit, themes have become much ‘safer’ – which was the last serial killer/horror film you saw where the victims weren’t a bunch of wise-ass asking-for-it teenager stereotypes you couldn’t possibly care less about? Anyway, growing public unrest pushes the police into tough crackdown measures, which in turn leads to unrest amongst the underworld. Tired of being hunted down, the underworld decides to solve matters by catching the murderer. A preposterous premise in itself, this adds a certain ironic humor as the story tracks the parallel efforts of the law and the law-breakers to catch the mysterious murderer.

Much has been made about the film’s use of sound, and rightly so. This may be less noticeable to modern viewers so used to watching sound films that one doesn’t gather how a lot of what we now take for granted was at one point of time pioneering, although there are still several noticeable scenes (most prominently the eerie use of the In The Hall of The Mountain King tune, used to identify the murderer) where the sound is employed to enhance a scene beyond what the camera shows. Not so for the visuals - Under Lang’s direction, cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner and editor Paul Falkenberg capture and splice together a cohesive and immediately astounding string of visuals:

In the first sequence of scenes, the camera shows a school girl enticed by a fedora-capped stranger who buys her a balloon – cut to her mother setting the lunch table, a quick glance at the clock, eagerly awaiting her return from school – cut to the clock showing time passed and the mother’s voice worriedly calling for the child – cuts to shot of empty flight of stairs that lead to the house, and to the unoccupied lunch table– cut to shot of discarded balloon hovering tangled amongst electric wires. There is no explicit depiction of the actual fate of the victims, but do we feel any need for that? Sheer brilliance.

A canny use of inter-cut scenes tracks the striking parallel of the discussions carried out by the police and the underworld vis-à-vis catching the murderer; a certain Francis Coppola unquestioningly picked up some of the trademarks of his oeuvre here.

The piece de triomphe is a masterful sequence that explores the beggars’ den, the camera seeming to move over tables and even apparently going one level up to another room where the beggars are being handed their assignment routes, moving through a window in the process. Someone tell me, how did they actually manage this in 1930?

There are tons of seminal visual sleights-of-hand on display, and a perpetually-imitated technique of splicing scenes, all used to push the narrative forward in a thoroughly cinematic way. In the film’s climax, the murderer played by Peter Lorre is captured by the criminals and subjected to an in-house ‘trial’. Up to this point Lorre’s murderer, save for an early character-defining cameo, has almost entirely been kept in the shadows. In the climax he breaks down before his prosecutors telling them about his uncontrollable pathological urge to do his dastardly deeds. Lorre, with his saucer-like sorrowful eyes and indolent sensual visage, is perfectly cast for the part and his histrionics are convincing. The film ends on an aptly abrupt note with the police breaking up the ‘trial’ and taking hold of the murderer with the words ‘In the name of the law…’