Saturday, July 08, 2006
ON TO THE M'S
Today's NYTimes Best 1176 Film was Fritz Lang's
And this one is a great one. Restored by the Munich Archive and on Criterion, the film often appears brand new.
Incidentally, M gets an unusually high 8.5 on the IMDb rating scale.
Lang's cinematography has the images leaping out at you.
The whole thing is dark and convoluted. Evil.
Peter Lorre plays the serial child molester/killer.
The cops can't find him but the underworld does. The heat is turned up so high that legitimate crooks are unable to make a living.
Lorre is pretty good here. We saw him in Casablanca and will see him soon in The Maltese Falcon. He had quite a career in Hollywood playing psychopaths and, at the same time, mocking himself as a comedian on a lot of radio shows and then on television.
He will be a song and dance man with Fred Astaire in Silk Stockings.
This film came after Metropolis which, as an M, we will be seeing soon.
Lang was having political trouble already in Germany and had some 'messages' in this film. He got even more overt in his next one. Soon, he was headed for Hollywood where he made many films which are on this Best list. We have already seen a few.
This will be a 5 out of Netflix5.
