Summary
Just about out of nowhere, M turns into a heist movie. Once the word has gotten back to the gang that Beckert has disappeared into the office building, the gang puts together a crack team to break into the building and find Beckert.
Notably, this is right when Inspector Lohmann finally cracks his case. While pursuing a lead from an investigation of one of the past child murders, Lohmann searches Beckert's apartment. There he finds remnants of the same red pencil that Beckert used to write his letters. The only issue is that Beckert's landlady has no idea where he might be. Lohmann, therefore, still has no way of being certain that he's found his man and, even if he thinks he's right, have no way of finding the suspect. Again, the police come up empty-handed.
Back at the office building, though, the gang ties up the security guards and embarks on a thorough search of the entire building. Franz is instructed to dig a hole so that they can circumvent a door that might be rigged to an alarm system, and this will consume his attention for the rest of this sequence.
We see Beckert locked behind a steel door, trying his hardest to pick or jimmy the lock in order to start his escape from the building. One of the gang members hears him working and brings it to Schränker's attention. They manage to unlock the door, but not before Beckert hears their attempts and escapes in the opposite direction, towards a dark storage area.
Beckert is pursued through this dark, labyrinthine storage area, quickly finding himself blocked in by broken chairs and other detritus. We watch his eyes bulge and his body flinch as the gang approaches. They wreck everything in their path, scrambling to find the murderer before the police show up. Finally, they happen on the corner where Beckert hides, and we see fear in his eyes. This is hardly the desensitized killer we may have expected.
A security guard has managed to sound an alarm, and now Schränker declares that they will retrieve the murderer within the 3 minutes that it will take for the police to arrive at the office building. Indeed, after a short pursuit, the gang has taken Beckert into their custody, and they exit the office building just before the police arrive.
There's only one thing they forgot: Franz. By the time the police arrive, Franz has climbed down through the hole he was asked to bore, and his cohorts are nowhere to be found. The police take Franz in.
Analysis
In the office building, lines quickly get blurred and Lang clearly delights in enacting a series of reversals with our expectations. The first is that Schränker is now donning a police uniform. On one hand, this is quite funny. He goes from a sharply dressed mob boss wearing ominous black gloves, to dressing like a cop in a silly looking hat. But, on the other hand, we again sense Lang channeling omens of the Nazi's rise. After all, what does it mean that a boss of the underworld has now assumed the uniform of the law, and is enforcing law more effectively than the government itself?
While Lang certainly builds tension and suspense in this office building sequence, he hardly casts the criminals as sympathetic characters. They brutalized a security guard and are ransacking this building. Lang's flimic techniques don't lead us to root for Schränker and his cronies to accomplish their mission. Instead, we're given a series of wide and medium shots, just like we were when we first met these criminals at their round table. Just like then, we feel far away from them, simply observing their actions and waiting to find out what their next unpredictable move will be.
Oddly, if there's anyone that Lang drives the viewer to sympathize with, it's Beckert. In another reversal, the hunter has turned into the prey, and now Beckert is the one who must fight for his life. The cat and mouse game has shifted from Beckert chasing children, to the gang chasing Beckert. When we find him trapped in that storage room, we feel a little trapped too. Lang does little to tell us about the architecture of this space and all that we know of it is that it's at the end of a dark hallway and quite claustrophobic.
Again, lighting here is key and used in an expressionistic way. When Beckert realizes that the gang is managing to open the door he's hiding behind, his shadow seems to trail him. It's as if he can't escape it. The shot of Beckert standing wide-eyed in the storage areas full of detritus is a memorable one. He's flanked by light and shadows, trapped amidst the confusion. Just about the only light shining on Beckert glistens off the sweat on his face.
Why would Lang make the effort to have us sympathize with a child murderer? Why not make his capture by a mob that took the law into its own hands a point of celebration in the film? Well, as with so much of the film, the events we see unfold give us a complex view of the characters in from the of us.
There’s nothing in these scenes to suggest that we are supposed to like or forgive Beckert just because he is portrayed as a caged animal. But we do, through his fear, come to see his personhood, his immutable status as a human. Perhaps he’s a bad man, but Lang uses this section of the film to remind us that it’s crucial that no person is ever thought of as less than a person. And this sets up the film's climax.
