Movie Discussion – M (1931) by Fritz Lang
Details
A simple, haunting musical phrase whistled offscreen tells us that a young girl will be killed. “Who Is the Murderer?” pleads a nearby placard as serial child-killer Hans Beckert (played by a searing Peter Lorre) closes in on little Elsie Beckmann . . . In his harrowing masterwork M, the Austrian-German filmmaker Fritz Lang merges trenchant social and political commentary with chilling suspense, creating a panorama of inner depravity and collective panic that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.
"One of cinema’s most convincing portraits of a sick society, in which the hapless Beckert is less an aberration, more the inevitable, even pitiable, end product. One can only imagine the ripples of unease it must have caused in an economically-ravaged nation teetering on the brink of totalitarian meltdown." (Time Out)
"M's urgency hasn't aged a day." (Slant)
"This astonishing movie represents an unsurpassed grand synthesis of storytelling... a masterpiece structured with the kind of perfection that calls to mind both poetry and architecture and that makes even his disciples' classics seem minor by comparison." (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader)
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Join the Toronto Philosophy Meetup to discuss the German classic M (1931) written and directed by Fritz Lang, recently voted the 36th greatest movie of all time in Sight & Sound's international survey of film critics and scholars and generally regarded as Lang's greatest movie. We previously discussed Lang's 1927 silent film masterpiece Metropolis.
Please watch the movie in advance (117 minutes) and bring your thoughts, reactions, and queries to share with us at the meeting. You can stream it with a viewing link to be posted on the main event listing here.
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We'll be joined by many other participants from the Toronto Philosophy Meetup at this meeting — https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup/events/314696970/
Check out other movie discussions in the group, currently happening about 2 or 3 times a month.
This link here is a spreadsheet of the 150+ movies we've watched in this group and my ratings for each. You're invited to share your ratings too if you've watched a bunch of these movies with us. (I can add your list here if you send me a link. You can make your own list on sites like Letterboxd or by copying my spreadsheet and filling in your own values. Note that my list doesn't include every movie that Yorgo hosted on cause I didn't watch all of them.)