M (1931)

Fritz Lang's M is a great timeless thriller, a great thriller for the atmosphere of dread and paranoia it cultivates, timeless because the sequence of events of the film, the deliberation and the plotting of the police and the gangsters is nothing more than a mask being peeled back as the film unfolds.  As the film unfolds it feels less like a procedural and more like the psyche of the beast unmasking itself methodically, as if the chase after child murderer Becket (Peter Lorre) is nothing more than the humanity itself exposing its' own devil, the problem of evil it struggles with in eternity.  The city is like an organic machine, and Becket merely filling in the ultimate quota.  He is pure evil, and yet innocent in that purity.  He commits the most appalling crime of all, the murder of innocents, and yet he is a symbol for society's own corruption, the way the machine systematically murders its' own innocence from within.  Because Becket is absolutely responsible, he is also absolutely absolved, because his crime is beyond reason, it is insanity, good and evil wrestling but joined in symbiosis, the ultimate monster none of us can bear.  Trapped by the criminals who want him perished so they can continue their vices without restriction by police and civilian paranoia, he finds himself charged guilty by the guilty, by those that greedily profit from the weak, those criminals of 10 000 reasons who cannot deal with the devil directly.  Becket must do that for their sake, god forbid they face the ultimate truth.

The film is a tense, taut, brilliant thriller.  The opening scene of the murder of little Ellsie is done with subtlety, shown only as a mother crying out for her daughter and the balloon Becket gave her caught in power lines.  It's a powerful image to kick off the meticulous frenzy as the gangsters plot to remove themselves from the murders so as to continue business unhindered by the police raids.  From there the tension only builds, until Becket is cornered in safe house by the gangsters.  He is their ultimate treasure, that which has been locked up and hidden, that which they want killed so they can finally be free.  But he cannot be killed, even by his own hand, such is his madness.  The final scene with the criminal courtroom is incredible and must be seen, and Lorre's performance as the tortured soul is devastating.  The film goes beyond merely pitying Becket, rather it simply shows the necessity of evil and the problems that arise when people try to take this into their own hands.