Summary
We open on a circle of children playing a game. A little blonde girl stands in the center pointing at the other children one by one, singing a song that goes
Soon a man in black will come for you,
And with his little chopper
He will turn you into ground beef.
When she stops, her finger lands on a child and she says, "you're out."
They are chided from a balcony by a mother, demanding that they stop singing such a morbid song. Soon, we are shown a woman hauling a heavy load of laundry up the stairs of her apartment building, delivering it to a woman we will soon learn is Elsie Breckmann's mother. They both seem exhausted by the tedium of their lives, not to mention the specter of this vicious predator.
The mother returns to her domestic business, awaiting her child's return from school. She cooks dinner, scrubs the laundry, and sets a place for Elsie at the dinner table. This is her routine, and for as long as nothing interrupts it, she notices nothing amiss.
We meet Elsie when she's leaving her school. It takes no time at all before she finds herself in harm's way, absentmindedly stumbling out into the busy street. We are quickly reminded how vulnerable children are, barely capable of looking both ways before stepping into traffic. A police officer comes and helps her cross. Elsie begins bouncing a ball in front of herself as she walks down the sidewalk and stops in front of a morbid flyer on the street.
The flyer tells of the child murderer and lists his victims. We come to realize that the song the girl in the first shot was signing is based on this incident. As we watch the shadow of Elsie's bouncing ball dance along the flyer, we see another shadow enter the frame, cast on the poster as well. It's a man in a coat and a fedora. The shadowy figure offers some niceties and lures Elsie away.
We see them approach a blind man on the street selling toys and knick-knacks. Elsie's new companion whistles Edvard Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" as he purchases the girl a strange balloon, bearing a cartoonish yet unsettling likeness to a child.
We cut away to Mrs. Breckmann, who has begun to realize that her Elsie is running late. There's a knock at the door, but it's just the man who delivers Mrs. Breckmann her serialized fiction. She's disappointed, and asks if he's seen Elsie. Wasn't she running up the stairs before him? No, Mrs. Breckmann responds, despondent. We see her look down the stairs and find nothing. She calls out the window to no response.
Elsie will never be returning home. We are shown an empty attic where her clothes hang to dry, her empty place setting at the table. Then we see her ball roll into the middle of a dusty field, and her balloon stuck and bobbing in power lines. It's clear the shadowy, whistling man was the killer, and Elsie was his latest victim.
The newspaper the following day says as much.
Analysis
Fritz Lang used his films to explore the complex social dynamics of a rapidly modernizing society. Whereas his science fiction classic Metropolis seems to pose a series of what-ifs about society, M acts like a piece of journalism. The opening sequence doesn't just show the murder that acts as a catalyst for the rest of this film's plot, but sets the scene for the bleak urban allegory with which we are about to sit down for the next two hours.
The first shot shows us a social configuration, of which we will see so many throughout the film. Lang shows us children playing a game in a circle to suggest a primordial version of the more complex group formations that we'll see later in the film. Like the savvy storyteller he is, Lang makes it clear with this group of children that an obsession with the killer will always be at the center.
We get a sense, too, of the social climate that this killer is adept at navigating. Take Mrs. Breckmann. She is a loving mother and a hardworking domestic, but when we meet her she seems absolutely exhausted. It's clear that her routine wears on her. And in this routine, she kind of loses track. Every day before this, we must assume, she has cooked dinner and done her chores while waiting for Elsie to return home from school, and every day before this Elsie did return. Lang points out that these children go missing precisely because we have these fatiguing modern, urban lives where sometimes a life just gets lost in the shuffle. It's a chilling claim.
Equally chilling is the nature of the crowd. Yes, M's plot is about a child killer, but the narrative arc really is driven by the crowd. So many of the shots in this opening sequence are wide shots of groups of humans. Lang's decision here is a peculiar one in narrative filmmaking, when the early minutes of films are so often dedicated to driving identification with a main character through close-ups so that we feel like we're walking in his shoes upon meeting the first conflict. Instead, Lang gives us this omniscient view of these people living their lives, with wide shots angled from above. Lang has little regard for the complexity of individuals, but much for the complexity of the societal dynamics he portrays.
And ultimately, all of these wide shots set the stage for the first bit of prowess we watch Lang exhibit. That shot when the shadow of a man in a fedora is cast on the wanted poster is chilling one. We immediately know this is the killer. Why? Certainly not because of his clothes. He's wearing the same outfit as so many men on the street in those after-school shots. With the killer's dress, Lang articulates another point about the modern city: that men are just faces in a crowd, and all a bad actor must do to disappear into the crowd is assume its favorite costume.
No, there's nothing visually peculiar about this shadow of the killer. Instead, this is simply the first close-up we've been given in M. We know it has to be the killer because he's suddenly in our space, so much closer to us and so much larger than any other person we've been presented with so far, even the exhausted Mrs. Breckmann, even the doomed Elsie.
