M le Maudit analyse

M le Maudit

        M is a 1931 German drama-thriller film written and directed by Fritz Lang. Realized during the early ages of speaking films, it revolves around the story of a child murderer and his manhunt perpetrated at the same time by the police and the criminal underworld. What are the main themes in this film ? After talking about the fear, preys and predators, we’ll talk about the question of justice.

V1

        During the whole film reigns an oppressing atmosphere, created mostly with the dramatization of sounds with for example scenes without any noises of very high-pitched screams or sounds that most of the time sound creepy. This oppressing atmosphere enables us to understand better the emotions, and most particularly the fear, felt by the characters. There’s two main examples of this fear : the one felt by the mother of the kidnapped little girl and the fear felt by the murderer being chased throughout the city. We here see a very interesting schema which is that the one that we thought to be the tormentor of the city ends up in the place of victim. We can recognize a switch of position between the preys and the predator because during the beginning of the film, the murderer is seen as a predator hunting kids, making people of the cities his preys but as soon as the manhunt begins, the murderer becomes the prey, chased by the same persons that feared him before, and is no longer represented as a killer but as a fragile person frightened by everything.

V2

        During the whole film reigns an oppressing atmosphere, with high-pitched voices, creepy noises or the absence of sounds. This oppressing atmosphere enables us to understand better the emotions felt by the characters. In M, the main emotion is fear, whether it is the fear felt by a citizen or the fear felt by the murderer being chased throughout the city, it is almost always present. By the way, this is an interesting schema where the murderer, the one that we thought to be the tormenter of the city, ends up at the place of victim. We can in fact recognize a switch of position between the preys and the predator because at the beginning the murderer kills children but he’s then chased by the criminal underworld and becomes by the same time a prey. During the manhunt, the murderer is no longer represented as a strong killer but as a fragile person frightened of being caught.

V1

As we talk of the manhunt, we can ask ourselves another question : should people out of the authorities be able to judge whether a person is guilty or not ? Well, the problem about this is that everybody is not qualified to judge someone, but the most important thing is that in an improvised jury like in the movie, there’s always people choosing a specific sentence in the aim of serving their personal interest, for example the criminal underworld needs the police controls to cease, and so they want the murderer dead. This is the same logic as when a police inspector or his family is involved in a case, he won’t be able to investigate this case since his judgement would be biased. Another interesting thing about justice is that in the movie, the murderer is accused of killing child, while the president of the jury judging him is himself researched by the police for having done several murders and the rest of the jury is also composed of criminals. How can there be a justice if you are being judged for something by people that have done the same thing ? Moreover, this trial is watched by a mob full of anger against the murderer. This is another thing that forces the hand of the jury to give a death sentence to the murderer and that’s why when he pleads the cause of psychological disorder, the jury says that it doesn’t matter and that he has to die anyway because he could start again since he can’t control himself. And this is the biggest problem in this trial : The jury didn’t care about the defense of the accused since he had already established what sentence he would give, before even hearing any defense arguments the murderer could use. This is clearly not what we could compare to a fair trial or to what we call justice.

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