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15 Q2 2016 / CINEMONTAGE for capitalizing on these lurid crimes. The movie, however, transcends its sensational subject matter to offer a perspective on the loss of individuality in an urban mass society and the lure of authoritarian rule that still casts shadows on human society. Adding to the film's power, director Lang — with editor Paul Falkenberg — built on the visual expressionism of German silent films to create expressionistic audio material that expanded the movies' means to portray a character's emotional reality. Lang's work over the previous eight years — including the two-part medieval epic The Nibelungen (1924) and the futuristic Metropolis (1927) — had been produced by Germany's largest film company, Ufa. By 1930, however, their association had become contentious. The director felt the studio had not adequately prepared for the coming of sound and, for his first sound film, he entered into an agreement with producer Seymour Nebenzahl of Nero-Film. Nebenzahl had already produced G.W. Pabst's adaptation of Frank Wedekind's Pandora's Box (1929) and Robert Siodmak's People on Sunday (1930), written by Billy Wilder. Like Lang, some of Sunday's creative team wound up working in Hollywood after Adolf Hitler came to power. In a 1963 interview, Lang recalled, "I told the producer, 'I can make whatever I please and you have nothing to say, except to give me the money…' and he accepted this." As for the story, Lang turned to Thea von Harbou, his wife and writing collaborator. He asked her, "What is the most despicable crime you can imagine?" and they began to turn out a screenplay about poison pen letters. But, on May 24, 1930, Kürten was captured by the police. Intrigued by the newspaper reports, the director shifted the script's focus to a sexual deviant who kills children. The things that concerned him were, Lang said, "what drives a man to such a horrible crime and laying out the pros and cons of capital punishment." The filmmaker was further aroused by how the intense police investigation of Kürten's crimes disrupted Düsseldorf 's "normal" criminal activity. The heightened surveillance imposed by the police led to gang alliances with the city's beggars to help track down the psychopathic killer. This theme of the common civic goals of legal authority and the underworld first emerged on stage in Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera in 1928. Nebenzahl and Nero-Film also produced Pabst's 1931 film version of the musical play just before M went into production. Asked in 1963 if Brecht had influenced him, Lang said, "Of course… Which of his contemporaries did he not influence?" Determined to achieve authenticity in his film, Lang toured prisons, and explored Berlin to find the beggars' social network. He spent eight days in a mental institution observing sex offenders, and interviewed psychiatrists about the mental states of compulsives. This experience, he later said, "convinced me of the injustice of the death penalty." Lang's research also took him to Berlin's Alexanderplatz police headquarters and London's Scotland Yard for an intensive review of police procedures. He based M's homicide detective, "Fatty" Lohmann, on the famed director of the Berlin Homicide Division, Ernst "Fatty" Gennat, who had been asked by the Düsseldorf police to work on the Kürten case. At the American Film Institute in 1973, Lang claimed credit for writing Lohmann's and the police officials' dialogue. Von Harbou, he said, was responsible for most of the rest of the dialogue, including the serial killer's gripping confessional speech in the criminals' kangaroo court. Wishing to cast the psychopath against the stereotype of the era, Lang said, "I used Peter Lorre, who nobody would think to be a murderer." The movie's success made the Hungarian actor an international star. THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY M. Paramount Pictures/ Foremco Pictures Corp./ Photofest