M
film — Germany — 1931

6.5
Fritz Lang. Does this name ring a bell for you? This is the director of "Metropolis" - the first feature-length sci-fi movie. He also directed this film that`s according to IMDB is the 49th greatest film ever. If I told you that it was made in 1931 you`d probably undestand that a film like this is quite hard to judge. Do you consider that old films deserve better ratings just because at the time nothing better was made? Or do you expect that a really good film will be able to stand out even 100 years after it was made? The storyline: a child murderer is plaguing the city of Berlin in something like 1930. The police can`t do nothing about him, so the regular criminals - thieves, burglars and other riff-raff - decide to catch him themselves. For the first half of the film Hans Beckert (the murderer) is on a hunt of little girls but after that he himself becomes the hunted. What`s weird is the sound - back in 1931 it was probably a common thing but I have never experienced a film that had only the sounds of people talking but no sounds of them walking or something like. There`s no music, there`s no city sounds, there`s absolutely nothing. Did I like it? Well, it was a bit too long for a film this old. The idea itself was a good one, but you can`t expect the level of suspence to be very high in a film that was made before WW2.
2005-01-06
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