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17 Q2 2016 / CINEMONTAGE Their collaboration produced the first full exposition of the style and techniques that became film noir. The shooting integrated documentary- style naturalism with dramatically lit expressionism. Complementing this, the audio emphasized specific street sounds over others to reflect the focus of a character's attention. A key example is the absence of a score and the use of source music. The only music in the movie were the tunes of street organ grinders and Beckert whistling Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" whenever his impulses overwhelmed him. Lorre was unable to whistle the melody, so the strains of Lang whistling are heard in the picture. The crew worked from a detailed shooting script with elaborate notes on set design, lighting and editing. During the pre-production planning that produced the shooting script, Lang and editor Falkenberg invented the use of voiceovers, pre-lapping and post-lapping. These innovations, the director said, "not only accelerated the tempo of the film but strengthened the necessary association in thought for two juxtaposed scenes." The producer booked the May 11 opening for M before shooting wrapped, allowing barely 10 weeks for post-production, but the meticulous pre-production planning facilitated the editing. A few days before the premiere, sitting with von Harbou and Nebenzahl in the office of the State Film Examiner, Lang recalled feeling "like a school child waiting for approval." The censors' verdict: "This film shows everything which we are opposed to showing in a picture, but it is done with such honesty and integrity that we don't want to make a cut." M was released in Germany at 117 minutes. For exhibition in the US, the Production Code Administration required the deletion of all indications of the murderer's sexual pathology and a 92-minute version of the film opened in New York on April 2, 1933. After the Berlin premiere, a leading Protestant gazette editorialized that Lang had "very skillfully avoided taking a decided stand on the death penalty." On May 21, 1931, reading his own views into M, Joseph Goebbels (later Hitler's Minister of Propaganda) wrote in his diary, "Fantastic! Against humanitarian sentiment. For the death penalty! Well made. One day, Lang will be our director." With the 1933 instatement of the Third Reich, Goebbels made overtures to Lang about making Nazi films. The liberal director, whose mother was Jewish, left Germany to carve out a career in Hollywood. The Jewish Lorre also fled to America, stopping over in England to play an assassin in Alfred Hitchcock's 1934 movie The Man Who Knew Too Much. Von Harbou divorced Lang, became a Nazi and continued to be a leading figure in the German film industry. Goebbels banned M, as well as Lang's last film before his departure, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), which premiered in Paris. In this film, M's Inspector Lohmann contends with a criminal genius imprisoned in an insane asylum hatching plans to take over Germany — plans that writers Lang and von Harbou (before their divorce) virtually copied from Hitler's writings. In 1951, against Lang's wishes, Nebenzal (now spelling his name without the 'h') produced an American remake of M, directed by Joseph Losey. Despite its Los Angeles location photography and surface fidelity, it cannot capture the original's social authenticity, making its points with didactic dialogue rather than visual drama. The last word on M remains Lang's. Commenting on the film's last line, he said in 1963, "The point of the film is not the conviction of the murderer but the warning to mothers, 'One has to keep closer watch over the children… All of you!'" He added, ironically perhaps, "This human accent was especially important to my wife at that time, the writer Thea von Harbou." f THIS QUARTER IN FILM HISTORY Adding to the film's power, director Fritz 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. M. Paramount Pictures/ Foremco Pictures Corp./ Photofest