The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Fritz Lang · a film · 1931 · written with Thea von Harbou · in German · the restored German version
Mode
Thriller of the hunt turned inquiry into a city; police procedural, underworld satire and trial in one film
Mythos
The bogeyman who takes children made a particular man; the hunted man pursued by a whole city, marked on the body like Cain, tried by a court of his own kind; the blind man who knows him by a tune
Phase
A few weeks in one city, from a child’s last walk home to a court in a derelict distillery and a last scene before a judge
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, mono sound, in German; Fritz Arno Wagner’s photography; no score, only Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King whistled by the murderer; speech, effects and long silences; the restored German version
Register
From criminals in bowler hats arguing their standing to a mother calling down an empty stairwell; terror held level by procedure
Scale
One city: its state, its mirror state, its poor, its families, its crowd, and one consciousness spoken from inside once
Governing Proposition
A man who kills children walks a German city whistling Grieg, and the city, in panic, sets two powers to catch him, its police and its criminal syndicate, until he is marked with a chalked letter and a court of thieves tries him in a cellar. The wager of the film is that sound and silence, used as structure in the first years of the sound film, can show a city that becomes a society of informers and a mob in the act of hunting, its law and its crime one machine in different coats, and a killer who experiences his compulsion as something done to him.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with children. In a courtyard they play a counting game, and the rhyme they sing is about the man who comes for children: “Warte, warte nur ein Weilchen” (“Wait, wait just a little while”). The bogeyman is in the children’s mouths before he is anywhere else. A mother, Frau Beckmann, played by Ellen Widmann, works at the laundry she takes in and waits for her daughter to come home. The film has set its whole subject in a song and a waiting woman, and has shown nothing yet.
Elsie Beckmann, played by Inge Landgut, walks home with her ball. A man with a round face, Hans Beckert, played by Peter Lorre, buys her a balloon from a blind seller, whistling as he does. At home her mother calls “Elsie!” down the stairwell, and the call carries over the empty stairs, into the attic, over Elsie’s place laid at the table. Then the film shows a ball rolling out of the undergrowth, and a balloon caught in the telegraph wires. The crime is never shown. It is given by sound over empty images, and the viewer supplies it.
Fritz Lang made it for Seymour Nebenzal’s Nero-Film from a screenplay he wrote with Thea von Harbou, and it was first shown in Berlin on 11 May 1931. It was his first sound film. Fritz Arno Wagner photographed it in black and white. There is no score: the only music in it is Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, whistled by the murderer, and the rest is speech, effects and long stretches of silence. It moves in four movements and a coda: Elsie and her mother; the city in panic and the police at work; the two conferences, cut together; the hunt; and the court, with a last scene before a judge. The film judged here is the restored German version. The English-language version made with Lorre in 1932 is a separate work and is not judged.
Movement II
The murderer writes to the press, and the city reads his letter. Fear goes into the streets. An old man who speaks to a child is surrounded and nearly lynched. The city that has set out to catch a killer begins, in the first hour of the hunt, to turn into something else: a society of informers and a mob, in which any man talking to a child is a suspect and any crowd a court.
The police go to work under Inspector Lohmann, played by Otto Wernicke. The film shows the method as a montage of procedure: fingerprints, maps with a compass laid across them, raids, the search of lodgings. Wagner shoots much of it from above, the map and the stairwell alike seen as a plan. The police raid an underworld bar, and the scene plays as comedy. The method is thorough, and it runs as a sequence of information.
Beckert is alone. He looks at himself in a mirror and pulls a face at it, a man studying the face the city is looking for. The film keeps him at the edge of its own procedure, glimpsed rather than followed, while the city fills the screen. The order is the argument: the city is shown as a mob for an hour before the killer speaks, so that when he does, his words fall on a court the viewer has learned to distrust.
Movement III
Two meetings are held. The police chiefs sit round a table to plan the hunt; the heads of the criminal syndicate sit round another, under Schränker, played by Gustaf Gründgens, in a leather coat and gloves, a civil servant of crime. The criminals, in bowler hats, argue their professional standing. Both tables want the same man, and both sit down to plan how to take him.
Lang cuts the two meetings together. Gestures pass across the cuts, from a detective at one table to a criminal at the other and back. Made in sequence they would be two scenes. Cut together they are one institution, the same machine in different coats, and the film has stated its argument in its structure without a word of comment.
The underworld has a means the police lack: the beggars. Their guild is set to watch the streets. The city has two states, and the second is better at watching than the first. Between them the man they hunt has no place to go, and neither state has any place for the child he killed.
Movement IV
Beckert stands at a shop window. The display is of knives, and they frame him. In the glass he sees a girl reflected, and the whistle begins. The tune is the only music in the film, and it has become his. The film has made a sound a symptom, and will now make it a clue.
The blind balloon seller, played by Georg John, hears the tune and knows it, the same tune he heard when a man bought a balloon for Elsie. He cannot see the man, but he can name him by his sound, and the beggars follow. An M is chalked on his back. Later Beckert sees it in a mirror, the letter on his own shoulder, and understands that he is marked. The blind man who knows him by a tune and the mark on the body are the oldest figures of a hunt, and here they are the working parts of a city’s system.
Beckert hides in an office building at night. The searchers go through it floor by floor, while in the lumber room Beckert works at a lock. The building is a trap, and the city closes it. They find him, and take him away.
Movement V
The underworld tries him in a derelict distillery. A cellar of faces looks at him, and Schränker leads the court. For the first time the accused speaks, and Lorre’s speech is the centre of the film. Beckert says, in substance, that he cannot help it; that he is followed, by himself; that he does not want to do what he does and is made to. The court has no answer to it but death, and Schränker gives his verdict. The question the film opens, the responsibility of a man who cannot do otherwise, it does not close.
The police arrive. A hand comes down on Beckert’s shoulder, and the court dissolves. The film then cuts to a last scene in a state courtroom: a judge, the mothers, and the mothers’ appeal. The change of register is abrupt. What the cellar showed, the coda says, and a disclosure that held by being shown becomes an appeal.
It has kept its questions open for ninety-five years. Siegfried Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler (1947), read it as a portent; others have read it as an argument against the death penalty, a study of mass society, a treatise on sound. Joseph Losey remade it in 1951. The police procedural and the serial-killer film, from Peeping Tom and Psycho in 1960 to The Silence of the Lambs and Zodiac, descend from it, and through Lang and the German émigrés in Hollywood so does film noir. The tune is still Grieg’s, and the film has made it the sound of a man walking toward a child.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test. Elsie’s sequence cannot go: it is the crime the film never shows. The panic in the streets, where an old man is nearly lynched for speaking to a child, sets the city’s condition. The double conference is the film’s argument in its structure. The beggars’ watch is how the city catches him; the whistle and the chalked letter are how; the office building is the trap; the court is the reckoning. What gives: the procedural montage of fingerprints, maps, raids and searched lodgings runs longer than the argument needs, and the raid on the underworld bar plays a scene of comedy twice. The coda before the judge states in words what the court has already shown.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure is stated and holds. A city that sets out to catch a child murderer becomes, in the process, a society of informers and a mob, and its two organised powers, the police and the syndicate, are the same machine in different coats. The double conference shows it in form, gestures passing across the cuts. A second truth lies under it: the compulsion to kill is experienced by the killer as something done to him, and a court of thieves has no answer to it but death. Beckert’s speech before them comes to this, that he cannot help it, that he is followed by himself. The film leaves open the responsibility of a man who cannot do otherwise, and should. Held below the top by the coda, which turns disclosure into appeal.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The elevation is terror, and it is frequent. Frau Beckmann calls “Elsie!” into the stairwell, and the call carries over the empty stairs, the attic, Elsie’s place at the table, her ball rolling out of the undergrowth, her balloon caught in the telegraph wires. Beckert at a shop window, framed by a display of knives, sees a girl reflected, and the whistle begins. The chalked letter on his back, seen by him in a mirror. The office building at night, the searchers going floor by floor while Beckert works at a lock in the lumber room. The court: a cellar of faces and Lorre’s speech. Between these the procedural and comic passages hold the register level by design, and that keeps the heights from coming oftener.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built. The bogeyman who takes children, sung by the children themselves in the opening counting game, is made a particular man with a round face, who buys a child a balloon and whistles Grieg. Around him the structure of the hunted man bears load: pursued by a whole city, marked on the body like Cain, tried by an underworld court of his own kind. The blind man who knows him by a tune is a figure from the oldest storytelling, and also a balloon seller with a licence. The particular stays particular throughout. What holds it at the bar of the gate is that the archetype is carried mostly by the first and last movements, and in the long middle, which is procedure, the myth goes under.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance was the German silent cinema of the 1920s, Lang’s own Dr. Mabuse films and Spione (1928) among it, and the early sound film, which was largely static, theatrical and filled with music. The turn: sound used as structure and silence as content; no score; an offscreen voice over empty spaces; a sound carried across a cut to join two places; a whistled theme that identifies a man, which the plot then uses to catch him. And a subject set at the centre of a commercial film, a child murderer near the Kürten case, shown as a sufferer as well as a monster. The stake was real. Held below the top because the thriller of the organised city was Lang’s proven path, and the visual grammar was the silent cinema’s.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The cross-cutting of the two conferences is the claim that law and crime are mirrors: made in sequence they would be two scenes; cut together they are one institution. The absent crime, given only by sound over empty images, makes the viewer supply the murder, and so implicates the viewer in the city’s imagination. The sound design is the instrument of the plot and of the argument at once: a blind man, a tune, a city that hears before it sees. The court is the form of the argument itself, a trial in which the accused speaks for the first time. Held below the top because the procedural middle is a container, information any form could carry, and the coda is set as a statement.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Ninety-five years of return are the evidence, and the readings are at odds. Siegfried Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler (1947), read it as a portent of the coming order; others have read it as an argument against the death penalty, a study of the mass society of Weimar Berlin, the foundation of the serial-killer film, or a treatise on early sound. It yields formally on return: the sound bridges, the overhead shots of maps and stairwells, the rhymes between police and criminal gestures, the knives in the window that frame him. It yields on its question, which it refuses to answer: who has the right to judge Beckert. Held below the top because its depth runs more in form and in one question than across a society.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1930s, and the sound cinema above all. The intrinsic force is a working grammar of sound at the moment the medium had none, made in the first years of sound in Germany: offscreen sound, the sound bridge, the identifying motif and silence as a dramatic instrument; and with it a new genre, the hunt for a compulsive killer seen partly through his eyes. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: immediate and unbroken, through the police procedural, the serial-killer film from Peeping Tom (1960) and Psycho (1960) to The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Zodiac (2007), Joseph Losey’s remake (1951), and, through Lang and the German émigrés in Hollywood, film noir. Held where it is because the organised city and the master criminal belong to Lang’s silent films.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Ninety-five years of survival. The defining form is whole in the restored German version; prints were shortened for decades, and a few minutes of the version first shown are reported lost, a loss small in proportion to what makes the work. Presence has been wide, long and internationally continuous, though, by report, not unbroken in Germany. The surface fixed to its moment, Weimar Berlin, its beggars’ guild and its police methods, has aged as history; the condition the film treats, a city’s fear and its appetite for a culprit, has not. The shortened prints, the lost minutes and the broken presence are charged, and the evidence would still carry more. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, since the medium has no centuries behind it, and the medium’s span holds it at 8.8.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Peter Lorre’s Beckert is one of the defining performances of the sound film: the furtive walk, the grimace in the mirror, the bulging eyes, and the speech before the court, where a man speaks his compulsion and his terror of it. Fritz Arno Wagner’s photography gives overhead shots of a stairwell, a map with a compass, the attic, the shop window and its reflections, a city of shadows built for sound. The cutting joins places by gesture and sound; the sparse mixing makes every effect a clue. Gründgens’s Schränker, in leather coat and gloves, is a civil servant of crime. The costs: some dialogue scenes are staged statically, in the manner of the early talkie; Wernicke’s Lohmann is broad comedy at moments; and the coda is set flat.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the comic business of the underworld conference, criminals in bowler hats arguing their professional standing, and Elsie’s ball rolling out of the bushes. One law governs both: the city is organised, every power in it works by system, and the system has no place for the child or for the man who killed her. The beggars’ guild, the police files and the court are one physics, and the comedy belongs to it, never a release from it. The range is wide, from farce to the stairwell. The strain comes in the last minutes: the cut from the cellar to a state courtroom and the mothers’ appeal is a change of register the film does not prepare, and it states as a moral what the law of the film had shown.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held in one structure: the state, in the police, the ministry, the press and the courts; the underworld as a mirror state, with its guild, its leader and its court; the economy of the poor, in the beggars’ association and the laundry Frau Beckmann takes in; the family, in the mothers and Elsie’s empty place; consciousness, in Beckert’s compulsion, given from inside in one speech and from outside everywhere else; the crowd and mass society, in the panic and the mob; justice, as law against lynching. They are integrated through the hunt. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent: the natural order beyond the streets, the sacred, love, and history except as the atmosphere a later viewer brings to it. One city, one hunt, a few weeks.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment, The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition, The Imperishable and The Made at 8.8. A city that becomes a society of informers and a mob in the act of hunting, its law and its crime one machine; a form in which two conferences cut together are one institution and a murder is given by sound over empty images; a working grammar of sound made when the medium had none, which founded a genre and has not stopped being used; ninety-five years of survival, the defining form whole in the restored German version and the city’s fear and appetite for a culprit, which it treats, not aged; and a making in which Lorre, Wagner’s photography and the sparse mixing bear weight.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.3: the state, the underworld, the poor, the family, the crowd, consciousness and justice are held through the hunt, but the natural order beyond the streets, the sacred, love and history are absent, and it is one city, one hunt and a few weeks. Above it, The Inevitable and The Sublime at 8.4: a procedural montage that runs longer than the argument needs, a comic raid played twice and a coda that states what the court has shown; and a stairwell, a shop window, a chalked letter, an office building and a court that rise to terror, with procedural and comic passages between them that hold the register level.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Unconcealment at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep meets it at 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.4, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, 8.6 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of M in the restored German version, judged as the film first shown in Berlin on 11 May 1931 repaired; shortened prints and any minutes lost from the version first shown bear on survival only. The English-language version made with Peter Lorre in 1932 is a separate work and is not judged. Directed by Fritz Lang for Nero-Film, produced by Seymour Nebenzal, from a screenplay by Thea von Harbou and Fritz Lang, photographed by Fritz Arno Wagner, with no score beyond Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King, whistled. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the German film; English renderings are the desk’s own, an aid to the viewer rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. German is quoted only where its words are certain; Beckert’s speech before the court is paraphrased, not quoted. Facts that could not be verified, among them the running times of the versions, the designers and the editor, the extent of what is lost from the first version, and the history of the film’s suppression in Germany and of the use made of its footage there, are not given.