m-AZING

CAUTION: DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE FILM M AND WOULD LIKE TO. I kind of give a lot away. Sorry Who knew the sight of children playing could be such a haunting scene? If this is hard for you to believe than the only thing you need for convincing is the establishing shot used by Fritz Lang in M. Nothing is spookier than an extremely high angle shot, almost bird’s eye view, of a circle of small children singing in their high voices about a serial killer or as they put it, “the black man [who] will come…and chop you up.” There’s nothing like a fine dose of foreshadowing. After all, Elsie, the girl singing the song, becomes Mr. Beckert’s (Peter Lorre) next “prize”. Another instance of foreshadowing that was absolutely bone chilling was the shot of Elsie’s ball, thrown by her, at the “Wanted” poster of the serial killer. If you didn’t catch the fact that something was going to happen to Elsie in the first scene, Lang makes it even clearer that she isn’t going to be around much longer. The first five minutes of the film was all I needed to be totally enthralled and frightened (I’m not afraid to admit it). I knew what was coming but I was still on the edge of my seat solely because I didn’t know how Lang was going to show the killing or tell the audience that Elsie didn’t make it through the day. Although I was expecting a ruthlessly horrifying scene I was pleasantly surprised by an equally horrific slightly montage like sequence of symbols, first with the shot of the lonely ball that has lost its owner and then the balloon of the child caught helplessly in the electrical wires. I had never seen such terrifying emotional poetry before.