Summary
There is precious little levity in M, but when the underworld plan to mobilize the street people takes shape, we are given perhaps the only outright hilarious scene in the film. We are in a homeless shelter or common meeting place for the street people, and are shown men taking inventory of their scavenged sandwiches and cigarettes. Lang, an unlikely humanist, gives us the first glimpse into the personal lives of his characters since that scene in Mrs. Breckmann's apartment, and paints a delightful, sympathetic portrait of these lowly men.
Schränker oversees the process by which street people are assigned specific quadrants of the city, sitting ominously with black gloves prominently displayed. One of the first men deployed, we recognize, is an organ grinder entertaining children at the exact spot where we opened on the little girl playing the morbid game about the killer.
Inspector Lohmann's first apartment search turns up nothing, but the vast network of street people brings us back to the man who we now understand to be the child murderer, Hans Beckert. He stops to look at an elaborate window display of spoons, and spots a girl in the reflection of a mirror he's standing at. He's overcome, it seems, swaying and dizzy. He skulks to a cafe where he has a bizarre interaction with the server, demanding a number of different beverages in quick succession before finally demanding cognac and taking multiple shots of the stuff. This is what Beckert looks like as he's getting ready to prey.
We see the blind vendor who initially sold Beckert and Elsie the balloon once again. He's at his typical post, still selling balloons. That's when Beckert walks up whistling "In the Hall of the Mountain King" with another little girl in tow. We're watching the Elsie scene repeat itself. The blind vendor recognizes the scene unfolding before him even if he can not see the people he's interacting with. After Beckert walks away, the blind vendor enlists a fellow street person to follow the whistling man, certain that it's the child murderer.
During this sequence, Lang gives us the only shot in the entire movie of Beckert committing some violence. After buying the girl a piece of fruit, he takes out his knife on a dark street. This must be when he is going to turn the girl into ground beef! But he does not. Instead, Beckert peels the fruit. The street person following him watching the scene and draws an "M" in chalk on his palm. When the moment is right, he walks to Beckert, pretends to stumble, and slaps Beckert on the back while yelling at him to watch out. Beckert now has a chalk "M" emblazoned on his back.
A few minutes later, the girl notices the "M" and tries to rub it off. Most of it remains, and Beckert knows they're onto him. Once he realizes that he is being followed, he loses track of the girl and strikes out on his own. After being pursued through a series of dark streets, Beckert is cornered and disappears into an office building.
Analysis
The elongated sequence where the street people pursue Beckert as he prepares to take another victim stands as one of the most exceptionally-crafted parts of the movie. Here, Lang constructs suspense masterfully, presaging the innovations of Hitchcock. That fantastic suspense is one of the main reasons why M feels old but not dated. Masterful film-making never goes out of style.
Lang drives a lot of the tension in this part of the film by leaning on experience from his days working as a silent film director. In fact, M was Lang's first sound film, which meant that while he embraced the ability to include spoken dialog and Beckert's haunting whistle, he had barely forgotten the tenets of silent film. In fact, just about none of the plot in this extended sequence is driven by dialog, but rather all by a series of interconnected cat and mouse games, played out over furtive glances and men in shadows.
One of the masterstrokes here is the constant sense that our characters are being watched. We first realize that Beckert has taken a seat at the cafe because we're peering at him through the shrubbery. We sense so much dread about how he will use that knife because we're driven to identify with the street person following him around town, and that dread is the street person's own. Lang keenly plays our own voyeurism as film viewers into the voyeurism of surveillance. There's something naughty about the business of following a man around, even if that man is a monster.
This is also the section of the film when Lang puts the German expressionist tradition to good use. While he doesn't employ the surreal set design that typifies the classics of the genre such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu, he does make expert use of shadow.
Of course, we're introduced to Beckert in the first place through shadow, and in that early scene, we have a sense that his shadow is invading our space. Lang makes a reversal during this sequence: now the people casting shadows are the members of the underworld and the street people in pursuit of Beckert. Through this play of shadows, we can get a sense of who has the power in these scenes. In other words, we develop a sense of who is the hunter and who is the hunted.
Notice, too, that this part of the movie focuses on individuals. It focuses on Beckert's madness as he prepares to find a new victim. It focuses on the blind vendor, an unlikely hero. It focuses on the man who slaps the "M" on Beckert. There's a shift here from the crowd to the individual as Lang develops the plot and build suspense. That focus on the individual is more familiar to classical narrative filmmaking and, in turn, helps Lang deliver on making a compelling story, as opposed to just a thought-provoking film.
