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that insolent panache refused to be daunted by the dark material. Wasn’t there a key moment in the film when a blind beggar identified Beckert—because he was whistling a theme from Greig’s Peer Gynt (this was a sound film)—and then another street criminal scrawled a white chalk M on the palm of his hand and slapped it on Beckert’s shoulder? That allowed one of the famous shots in film history where Beckert looks in a mirror and sees the M on his back (like a frightened man gazing at a screen).
    M is a classic now, among our great films, but it was unprecedented in pushing the regular process of audience identification to a new limit. Beckert kills children. You know you are against that. In 1931, it was not possible for a movie to show that action—today, we have become more sophisticated and tolerant. But there is an alarming moment in Lang’s film where he cuts to a sudden close-up of Beckert taking a knife from his pocket. He flicks it open—and peels an orange for a little girl. Even now, it’s ample suggestion; in 1931, it must have been more frightening still (we all know that moment when we guess a film is going to show us something so awful we may not be able to watch).
    In the 1931 movie, the child killer is such a disturbance to organized crime that the underworld hunts the killer along with the police. He is captured at last and accused in a mock trial staged by the criminals. Beckert breaks down and admits to his irresistible impulse—he is crazy, but he can explain it. He may be the most appalling movie killer shown to that time, but he is the one who makes the most insidious appeal for sympathy in which the pathology of the murderer is infernally tangled with Lorre’s eloquence as an actor.
    I suspect the piercing shot of Beckert seeing himself in the mirror (or on a screen) was instinctive on Lang’s part, but he was a fervent psychologist of screen dynamics, and he created imagery with the spontaneity of a poet—albeit a cold one. The image speaks to the new ambiguity that M has uncovered and the way we are gazing at, and beginning to want to understand, a figure who would be alien and alarming in most circumstances. Suppose at a screening of M in Berlin a man had been caught attacking a child in the audience, mob fury would have descended on him without mercy (and Lang was very good on mob fury). But that same audience is breaking perilous ground in contemplating Beckert’s justification. The “ordinary” status of reality is being undermined by a new detachment. The dilemma will recur throughout this book, but M is one of the first times the slippage was clear. And it is a great film, as beautiful as it is sinister. Is that mix really possible? Or is it something cinema invented? Everyone liked M , from Graham Greene to Joseph Goebbels, who wrote in his journal, “Fantastic! Against humanitarian soppiness. For the death penalty. Well made. Lang will be our director one day.”
    The consequences are as fascinating as the film itself. For Peter Lorre, it was a breakthrough and a curse. No one in thebusiness ever forgot his performance, or believed he should depart from it. He felt imprisoned by the assumption that he was perfect casting as a murderer. About two years after the movie was made, in the spring of 1933, Lang was called in for an interview by Goebbels. The new head of propaganda and the Führer himself had been thrilled by Lang’s pictures. So they wanted him to take charge of film for the Third Reich. Not long thereafter (though not as swiftly as he claimed later), Lang left Germany (Lorre quit, too). They went their separate ways to Hollywood, yet never worked together again. As for M , it was some time before its insights flowered—for censorship stood in the way to protect us. But over time the medium shrugged that off, and so we were in for a run of extraordinary films and shows: Psycho (no director learned