Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/681807
16 CINEMONTAGE / Q2 2016 Born Laszlo Löwenstein, Lorre came to Berlin in 1928 to join the avant-garde People's Theater, founded by Socialists in 1899 and subsidized by labor unions. This short, pudgy, bulging-eyed performer conveyed an emotional intensity in a variety of roles for the theatre — an exotic gangster in Brecht and Weill's Happy End (1929), a teenager alarmed by his puberty in Wedekind's Spring's Awakening (1929) and a sexist soldier in Pioneers in Ingolstadt (1928), an early feminist comedy. Appropriately, Lang offered Lorre the role of Hans Beckert while he was rehearsing for Brecht's A Man's a Man (1931), in which he played a meek porter transformed into a ruthless killer after being recruited into the army. Every day during production of M, the actor returned to the theatre after the shoot to rehearse Brecht's play and to appear in a Soviet farce about a Moscow housing shortage. For three days after filming the kangaroo court scene, however, the actor could not appear on stage. Years later, in an account of the production, Falkenberg wrote, "Lang beat a performance out of Lorre in the film's finale…past the limits of physical endurance." The director ordered numerous takes of the actor being kicked in the shins with nailed boots and being thrown down concrete stairs into a wood pile, as vividly shown in the film. Among other People's Theater actors cast for M was Otto Wernicke, the admired "actor of the people" who played Inspector Lohmann. From Max Reinhardt's Deutsches Theater, Gustaf Gründgens brought a sophisticated air to the role of Schränker, the criminal leader. This actor later became a Nazi and was the director of the Prussian State Theatre under the Third Reich; the central character of István Szabó's Oscar- winning Mephisto (1981) was based on Gründgens. For extras, Lang hired professional criminals he had come across in his research; many of them can be seen among the crooks in the kangaroo court, filmed on location in an abandoned schnapps factory. While shooting this scene close to production's end, word got out that the police planned to raid the set. The director managed to persuade his "jurors" to stay long enough for him to get the shots he needed before the police arrived. There had already been a high rate of turnover — 24 extras were arrested over the course of production. The bulk of the shooting took place in a zeppelin hangar converted into a film studio outside Berlin. In 1965, Lang told Peter Bogdanovich that he had shot there before, but when he went to arrange for M — originally titled Murderer Among Us — the manager refused to rent the facility. He told Lang the picture shouldn't be made because it would hurt many "who will become very important." When the filmmaker asked "why a movie about a child murderer should hurt anybody," the manager's attitude changed and Lang got his lease. Lang noticed a swastika button pinned under the manager's lapel and realized the man had assumed from the title that the film would slur the Nazis. The director decided to rename the film. While shooting, and struck by the strong visual imagery of the white chalk 'M' impressed from a crook's palm onto the back of the killer's coat, Lang found his title. The screenplay had been completed in November 1930 and the six-week shooting schedule extended from mid-December 1930 through early February 1931. Fresh from The Threepenny Opera, director of photography Fritz Arno Wagner and sound recordist Adolf Jensen went straight into production on M. Wagner had also shot Destiny (1921) and Spies (1928) for Lang. THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY M. Paramount Pictures/ Foremco Pictures Corp./ Photofest