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Picture: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin)
Actor: Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
Actress: Marlene Dietrich (Morocco)
Director: Fritz Lang (M)
Supporting Actor: Peter Lorre (M)
Supporting Actress: Joan Blondell (Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse)
Screenplay: René Clair (Le Million)
Special Awards: M (prod. Seymour Hebenzal) (Best Picture-Drama); Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar) (Best Actor-Drama); Marie Dressler (Min and Bill) (Best Actress-Comedy); René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography)
Must-See: L'Age d'Or; Animal Crackers; The Big Trail; City Lights; The Dawn Patrol; Dracula; Little Caesar; M; Le Million; Morocco; The Public Enemy
In retrospect, the twelve months running from August 1, 1930, to July 31, 1931 (in the Academy's odd Oscar season of the day) turned out to be a year of beginnings and endings.
The best movie of the year, Charlie Chaplin's delicate, poignant comedy City Lights was the last silent movie Hollywood ever produced (like the website "Silent Era," I judge Modern Times to be a "mute sound picture"). For all practical purposes, the silent era had come to close by 1929, and only Chaplin's enormous popularity and the brilliance of City Lights could have induced an audience to accept the anomaly of a silent movie in 1931.
1931 marked the last gasp for a German film industry that had given the world F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Expressionism, and such films as The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Metropolis and M. Within two years, the Nazis would come to power and those artists who didn't flee or collaborate soon found themselves censored, arrested or murdered. Many German filmmakers, such as writer-director Billy Wilder, emigrated to Hollywood and had successful careers. But the German film industry as a whole would never again have the impact on cinema that it had in the 1920s and early years of the 1930s.
But 1930-31 was also a year for beginnings. James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson burst onto the scene, dazzling audiences in two of the essential gangster flicks of the early sound era, and continuing to dominate the Hollywood scene for years to come. American audiences also became acquainted with Marlene Dietrich for the first time. And in the space of twelve months, Clark Gable would rise from uncredited bit player to major star with tough but sexy roles in A Free Soul and Night Nurse.
I've written at length about all the titles on my list of the Must-See Movies of 1930-31. I leave to you the pleasure of hunting for them through the last three months of this blog's archives.
As great as 1930-31 was, the next twelve months would prove even better, especially for Hollywood which was at last getting the hang of the sound technology that had turned the old order upside down in 1927. On the horizon are Frankenstein, Scarface, Grand Hotel and many others. I'll have the list of nominees for you tomorrow in celebration of the New Year.
Oh, and later today: an end-of-year top ten list! Even the Monkey is not immune to the demands of traditional movie criticism.
The results are in from this week's Monkey Movie poll, Who would you choose as best director of 1930-31?
Fritz Lang who directed Peter Lorre in the serial killer classic, M, ran away with it, receiving 6 of the 10 votes cast. The immortal Charlie Chaplin picked up 2 for directing City Lights and René Clair (Le Million) and Luis Buñuel (L'Âge d'Or) received one vote each.
Tod Browning who directed Dracula had admitted last week in a interview conducted strictly between the left and right lobes of my cerebral cortex that he feared he was just in this poll to round out the field and this proved to be the case.
Raoul Walsh, William A. Wellman and Josef von Sternberg were annoyed not to be in the poll at all and called for an investigation.
After the win, Lang and his (alleged) mistress, actress Joan Bennett, shared a celebratory cigarette on the set of their current movie project, the film noir thriller Scarlet Street.
"Winning this poll," said Lang at a hastily-arranged press conference, "means as much to me as winning the Katie Award itself. Well, almost. I mean, I'm not crazy. The Katie Award is big and will provide some real leverage at contract time. But this is nice, too."
By the way, perhaps I'm telling stories out of school, but the vote for René Clair came from none other than our own beloved Katie-Bar-The-Door. She felt Clair's work on Le Million was innovative, clever and warm, not to mention it's her favorite movie of the five listed here. She's right, of course. Le Million is on the short list for most pleasant surprises I've received while working on this blog and I give it my highest recommendation. But, well, I went with Lang for the reasons I've previously stated at length.
In any event, whoever you voted for, you're right, their work was the best of the year. A good year for directors all the way around.
This is a public domain copy of M made available through the Internet Movie Database, so if you don't want to spring for the two-disc Criterion Collection set and can't wait for it to arrive from Netflix, you can at least see it here legally.
I myself worked off the Criterion copy when I was writing my essays about Fritz Lang (here and here) and Peter Lorre (here) which explains why my quotes don't track with the subtitles you'll see in this print.
[To read part one of this essay, click here.]
M: The Unseen Horror
Fritz Lang's M is a masterpiece of psychology, not just the psychology of child murderer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre in a performance that launched his career), but the psychology of the audience as well. Using nothing much more than sound and shadows, Lang created a genuine sense of suspense and horror by exploiting a basic fact of human psychology, that we are most afraid of what we can't see. Indeed, the most explicit act of violence Peter Lorre does in M is to the orange he surgically skins with a switchblade.
Not until the 1940s, when the legendary Val Lewton produced such classic films as Cat People and The Body Snatcher, would an audience experience so much terror without seeing so much as the suggestion of blood spilled.
M is the story of a city gripped by fear—eight children murdered with no clue as to the killer's identity—and as the movie begins, we are witness to the murder of the ninth. A mother calls for her daughter as the camera cuts from one empty place to another—the stairwell of their tenement, the courtyard where children played moments before, the girl's untouched place setting at the dinner table. Of the killer, we see only his silhouette as her leers at the girl bouncing a ball; we hear him whistling a tune as he buys her a balloon.
And then in one of the most effective shots in movie history, the ball rolls out of the woods, the balloon floats free and the screen fades to black silence.
Lang was one of the first directors to grasp the value of the new sound technology, using it not as Hollywood was, as a novelty—larding weakly-plotted love stories with forgettable songs—but as a means of conveying his story and heightening his audience's emotional involvement. For example, every time Lorre commits murder, he whistles the same tune ("In The Hall Of The Mountain King" from the opera Peer Gynt), so that later when the camera follows a girl down the street and you hear the whistling off screen, you know what's coming, the moment all the creepier for not knowing exactly where the attack is coming from.
Lang was working within the same limitations of early sound technology as everybody else and yet in many ways M could have been made yesterday. Lang used an interesting strategy to get around the problem of sound cameras which were pretty much immobile: the camera is at rest for speaking scenes, but is in constant restless motion in those shots that don't have dialogue, dubbing in a few sound effects afterwards.
The result are some shots you won't see again until Citizen Kane, for example the scene where the camera apparently dollies in through a bay window, snakes around the room and come to rest in a close up on one of Lorre's key pursuers.
Lang also uses voice-overs to keep things moving. Rather than leave the camera on, say, a police specialist as he reads aloud from a psychological profile of the murderer, Lang lets the man continue to speak as the camera instead cuts to Lorre himself, studying his own face in a mirror. A modern audience is so accustomed to the technique, it's easy to forget someone had to invent it; rather than treating movies as simple film records of stage plays, directors such as Lang, René Clair and Rouben Mamoulian told their stories in ways that took advantage of cinema's unique opportunities.
Lang and film editor Paul Falkenberg also use quick cuts back and forth between scenes to comment on the action. When, for example, the constant police presence make the lucrative activity of Berlin's organized crime syndicate impossible, the syndicate's leader holds a meeting and maps out a strategy to capture Lorre—even as the police commissioner simultaneously holds his own strategy meeting. The camera cuts back and forth between the two meetings with cops and criminals finishing each other's sentences, underscoring one of the great themes of the movie, that in the panic of the Great Depression, Germany was in danger of trading its ineffectual democracy for the deadly efficiency of the Nazi party, one of those trades that too many think sounds nice in the short run but which Lang knew promised an even greater misery in the not-so-distant future.
Had it been just an exercise in style, M would still be one of the most effective thrillers ever made, but Lang is interested in more than just a resolution to his police procedural, instead shifting the focus to a study of vigilantism and mob rule. Lang takes advantage of another of life's perverse facts, that we identify with whatever character the camera follows, to force us into a complicity with Lorre as he's trying to escape from the pursuing vigilantes. Lang focuses his camera on him, shooting through doorways and windows, often from above, watching furtively, the Expressionistic sets and lighting that emphasizes shadows and confined spaces, and now after identifying with the victims and their grieving mothers, with the police and the criminals who hunt Lorre, we are now compelled to identify with Lorre.
In so doing, Lang raises questions about the balance between freedom and security, justice and efficiency, and the rule of law and the rule of the mob, that are still relevant today. Lang was watching ruthless thugs and a panicked public pull Germany to pieces, pitting neighbor against neighbor as posturing politicians and a news-hungry media played up the hysteria, and if you watch carefully, you realize nothing much has changed—we've just moved the proceedings to cable television.
And what's wrong with a little vigilantism, you might ask? Nevermind that in 1931, the Nazi party's rise to power made the question fatally shortsighted, Lang raises the possibility that Lorre's serial killer might really be insane. And if end-running the presumption of innocence for some emotionally-satisfying instant justice doesn't keep you awake at night, what about the innocent men beaten on street by a mob all too willing to jump to conclusions, what about the night-watchman who are tortured and beaten simply so the criminals can get their hands on Lorre before the police do. Lang is suggesting that the violence of the compulsive murderer isn't much different than the violence of the lawless mob, and condemns the practice of pretending that the innocents who are one of ours are victims, while the innocents who are one of theirs are collateral damage.
"The idea that each individual is responsible for what happens to the poorest, most anonymous child on the street," says one character, voicing the movie's key idea, "hasn't even dawned on the public at large!" Oh, Lang prays, that such a concept take hold before the Nazi party comes to power. It didn't. Hitler became chancellor of Germany just two years after the film's release.
The Life And Legacy Of Fritz Lang
Born in Vienna in 1890, Fritz Lang initially trained as a painter but began writing movie scenarios while recovering from wounds suffered in battle during the First World War. Working with his wife, screenwriter Thea von Harbou, Lang directed a series of highly-acclaimed movies in Germany, including Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler, Die Nibelungen, the science fiction classic Metropolis and in 1931 his landmark achievement, M.
After M, Lang made one more film in Germany, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. The anti-Nazi theme in the second leg of the Mabuse trilogy was even more overt, so much so that von Harbou reported her husband to the authorities (she later divorced him and embraced the Nazis). Interestingly, even though The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was immediately banned, Joseph Goebbels offered Lang the opportunity to head the by-then nationalized German film industry while hinting darkly that he was willing to overlook Lang's Jewish ancestry. Lang was no fool and he was no collaborator—he fled Germany soon after the meeting (legend says that very afternoon), leaving his wife, his films and his fortune behind.
"His act of moral courage," Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster wrote in their book, A Short History of Film, "is difficult to overestimate; had he stayed and lent his considerable skill and international reputation to the Nazi movement, he would have been a formidable propagandist for the Reich. But despite his innate pessimism and fatalistic outlook, Lang acted quickly and decisively, removing himself from harm and depriving Hitler of Germany's most popular film director at the height of his early fame."
Lang worked in Hollywood for over twenty years, never quite finding the same success he enjoyed in Germany, but making some fine movies including his first two English-language efforts, Fury and You Only Live Once, and a couple of post-war noir classics, Scarlet Street and The Big Heat.
He had a well-deserved reputation for a perfectionism that bordered on cruelty—for example, he had Peter Lorre thrown down a flight of stairs a dozen times for a scene in M, treating the actor not as a human being but as a visual prop—and his painstaking methods didn't sit well in star-driven Hollywood. Very few name actors agreed to work with him more than once.
"In The Return of Frank James," Henry Fonda said in an anecdote recounted at the wonderful Self-Styled Siren, "I had a scene where I come into a barn hunting down John Carradine, who has killed Jesse. I had to come in to a point, look around, hear something and exit. That's all there was to the scene. We were about five hours doing it because Lang decides he wants cobwebs from the overhead beam down to the post that stood where I had to stop for a moment. So they send to the special effects department, and a guy comes down and blows cobwebs around. It's easy to do. But then Lang would come in and break holes in them to make them look like old cobwebs. Pretty soon he was breaking so many holes that the entire thing collapsed, and the effects guy would end up having to do it over. I sat there watching. By this time I knew Lang so well I would make bets with guys that we would be three hours, [mucking] with the cobwebs in a scene where I come in and stand for two seconds, then walk out!
"Anyway," he said, "I didn't enjoy working with Fritz Lang." And that was a movie Fonda liked.
Aside from his conflicts with actors and producers, I also suspect that Lang was a fish out of water in America. Not one of his German classics could have been made in Hollywood—Irving Thalberg, for example, while admiring M, admitted he would have fired the director or writer who had come to him with the idea—and without the same intimate knowledge of the new society he found himself living in, the images themselves, which were an obsession of Lang's to begin with, became the message, to the frustration of those who worked with him.
Lang returned to Germany late in his career and made three films there, including the third entry in the Mabuse trilogy, none successful. He was never nominated for an Oscar or any other award, although the German film industry did recognize him in 1963 "for his continued outstanding individual contributions to the German film over the years."
No matter. The best of Lang's early German films—Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, Metropolis, M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse—have earned him a place at the table of history's great directors. He's my choice for the best director of 1930-31.
Trivia: After M, Lang would again explore the danger of mob rule in his first American film, Fury, the story of an innocent man who barely escapes a lynch mob only to be consumed by his own lust for revenge. He fought to cast an African-American actor in the lead role—what an incendiary picture that would have made in 1936—but the studio insisted on Spencer Tracy instead who gave one of his best early performances.
He spent his entire professional life playing mad scientists, sinister criminals and oily little weasels, his goggle-eyes and oft-imitated raspy, accented voice became the movie personification of evil, and yet nothing in Peter Lorre's long film career quite prepares you for his chilling portrayal of movie history's first serial killer, Hans Beckert of Fritz Lang's classic psychological thriller, M.
No charming, chianti-sipping killer is Beckert—he preys on little girls, luring them with balloons and candy and kind words before leading them into the woods or an empty lot to perform his sadistic, depraved rituals. That by the end of the movie you also question the motives and methods of Beckert's would-be judges, indeed, that some in the audience even feel sympathy for him, is a testament to Lorre's talent, Lang's direction and Thea von Harbou's screenplay, and though he played the part in 1931 and literally hundreds of imitators have followed, I would argue Lorre's Beckert is the most convincing portrait of a serial killer ever essayed, one that makes more recent depictions seem like what they in fact are—cartoon monsters and manipulative contrivances.
As the movie opens, Berlin is already in turmoil as a serial killer preys with impunity on the city's children, eight so far, with the promise of more murders to come.
"Just you wait," sing the children as they play a game, "it won't be long/The man in black will soon be here/With his cleaver's blade so true/He'll make mincemeat out of you!" not quite grasping, as their panicked parents do, just how close the danger really is. And indeed, as one of the children, little Elsie Beckmann, wanders away from her playmates to bounce a ball against a poster seeking information about the killer, Peter Lorre's shadow appears in profile. His back to us, whistling a tune, he buys the girl a balloon and quietly leads her away.
And then as Elsie's mother calls for her child with greater and greater urgency, we see some of the most unforgettable images in movie history—the ball rolling out of the woods, the balloon caught in a power line—that signal that despite all the precautions, another murder has taken place. Unlike the other famous motion picture monsters of 1931, Dracula and Frankenstein, this monster has lost none of his power to shock and there's no retreating into the comforting reassurances that it's just a movie—M was inspired by real events and they are repeated today with appalling regularity.
Lorre actually spends relatively little time on screen and has only one large speaking part, hence the supporting award. In fact, M is first and foremost a police procedural, maybe the first in movie history, as well as a scathing attack on the German society then in the process of sweeping Hitler into power. But it's Lorre's performance that holds the movie together, breathes a sinister life into it, and afterwards, he's what you remember.
We glimpse his shadow, his back, briefly his face a mirror, but not until nearly fifty minutes into the movie do we see Lorre full on, buying an apple from a street vendor. And it's as he's feeding this physical hunger that he sees his next victim and another, terrible hunger hollows him out.
"I have to roam the streets endlessly," he later says, describing the moment, "always sensing that someone's following me. It's me! I'm shadowing myself! Silently, but I still hear it! Yes, sometimes I feel like I'm tracking myself down. I want to run—run away from myself! But I can't! I can't escape from myself! I must take the path that it's driving me down and run and run down endless streets! I want off! And with me run the ghosts of the mothers and children. They never go away. They're always there! Always! Always! Always! Except—when I'm doing it—when I—Then I don't remember a thing. Then I'm standing before a poster, reading what I've done. I read and read—I did that? I don't remember a thing! But who will believe me? Who knows what it's like inside me? How it screams and cries out inside me when I have to do it! Don't want to! Must! Don't want to! Must! And then a voice cries out, and I can't listen anymore! Help! I can't! I can't! I can't!"
It's Lorre's only lengthy speech of the movie, but boy, what a speech, and so convincing is his anger, fear, pleading, wheedling, all the classic stages of grief in the face of a certain death sentence, some critics and audience members forget that it's a self-serving rationalization. 
The very first time we see Lorre's face, in a mirror, he's pulling comical faces, "to see in himself the monster others see in him," as Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert puts it, and enjoying what he sees. He writes taunting letters to the newspapers while whistling the same tune he whistled as he killed little Elsie Beckmann. And he has the presence of mind to break off a pursuit of a new victim when there's a chance he'll get caught.
It takes a brilliant piece of acting to make you forget that this sweaty, self-loathing weasel has murdered nine children. Viewers (then and now) aren't used to this sort of complex characterization and they wait in vain for the director and the actor to tell them how to feel and what to think. Lorre and Lang were going for something deeper, more lasting. Is he insane, is he bluffing, what should the mob do with him? Here's the messy reality, the movie says, make of it what you will.
Peter Lorre was born Laszlo Lowenstein in 1904 in Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia), but ran away to Vienna at an early age where he worked as a bank clerk and (he claimed) studied briefly with Sigmund Freud before turning to acting, a profession so difficult to break into that Lorre later said, "I am the only actor, I believe, who really had scurvy." Moving to Berlin, the young actor worked with playwright Bertolt Brecht, starring in Mann ist Mann where he came to the attention of Fritz Lang. His performance in M made him an international star.
The Jewish Lorre fled Germany in 1933 soon after the Nazis came to power, eventually landing in London where he starred in Alfred Hitchcock's 1934 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much. At the time of his first interview with Hitchcock, Lorre spoke little English and bluffed his way through the conversation by watching as Hitchcock told stories and then laughing uproariously whenever he thought the director had reached a punchline. Whether Lorre fooled Hitchcock, I can't say, but Lorre got the part and learned his lines phonetically.
His performance in The Man Who Knew Too Much led Lorre directly to starring roles in Hollywood, beginning with Mad Love and Crime and Punishment in 1935. He followed those with dozens of suspense and mystery movies for Warner Brothers including eight Mr. Moto movies, and in 1941 perhaps his best Hollywood role, that of Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon.
The latter movie was the first of Lorre's nine pairings with character actor Sydney Greenstreet, surely one of the most unlikely of Hollywood's successful screen teams, one tall and overweight with a bellowing English stage actor's voice, the other short and thin with a raspy German accent, neither of them remotely attractive and usually playing criminals. Outside of The Maltese Falcon and 1943's Casablanca, the best of their pairings was probably The Mask of Dimitrios, an atmospheric conspiracy thriller that has Lorre and Greenstreet backtracking the trail of the mysterious Dimitrios Makropoulos, international assassin, smuggler and spy.
Despite a career of unforgettable supporting work, Lorre was never nominated for an Oscar.
During the television era, Lorre made numerous guest appearances spoofing his own image and he was often imitated. His cartoon self frequently battled Bugs Bunny, Robin Williams imitated him in Disney's Aladdin and he was the inspiration for Ren in the animated series Ren and Stimpy. In 1997, the Brooklyn band The World/Inferno Friendship Society released an album entirely about Lorre entitled Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre's Twentieth Century. Last year BBC radio broadcast Michael Butt's play Peter Lorre v. Peter Lorre.
Lorre himself shrugged at the sincerest form of flattery. "All that anyone needs to imitate me," he said, "is two soft-boiled eggs and a bedroom voice."
Although as a performer he reached legendary status, Lorre was in his personal life lonely and depressed, addicted to morphine, bad with money. He was married three times and fathered one child, a daughter, Catherine. He worked right up until his death in 1964.
Picture: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin)
1931 marked the last gasp for a German film industry that had given the world F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Expressionism, and such films as The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Metropolis and M. Within two years, the Nazis would come to power and those artists who didn't flee or collaborate soon found themselves censored, arrested or murdered. Many German filmmakers, such as writer-director Billy Wilder, emigrated to Hollywood and had successful careers. But the German film industry as a whole would never again have the impact on cinema that it had in the 1920s and early years of the 1930s.
I've written at length about all the titles on my list of the Must-See Movies of 1930-31. I leave to you the pleasure of hunting for them through the last three months of this blog's archives.
