The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity

By Tom Gunning

"Thus, in the course of [Anton Kaes] volume, we learn about such topics as the rise of serial murders in the Weimar Republic (and public obsession with them); the increasing grip on public consciousness of new media like radio and tabloid newspapers; the increasing transformation of everyday life into an arena of discipline and a concomitant policing of society as well as a peace-time militarisation of the populace; a growing fascination with a typological understanding of criminality according to physiognomy (the portrayal of the bizarre murderer Hans Beckert by Peter Lorre enabling M, as Kaes astutely notes, to be picked up by the Nazis as a demonstration of the ostensible ties between perversity and (Jewish) "race")."

The Permanent Magic of Fritz Lang

By Rob White

"His career coincided almost exactly with Alfred Hitchcock's, and the comparison between the two directors is often made. Both thrived in silent film, but easily adjusted to sound. Both moved from Europe to America and recreated their genius in a new culture. Yet while Hitchcock is instantly recognisable and his films are easily seen, Lang's work and reputation are much more obscure. Though no critic would question Lang's stature there's no consensus about which of his films are masterpieces. And substantial scholarly work on Lang is astonishingly scarce. David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, even says that 'Lang's adult stories are too concentrated for today's standards'. But this is too much of a simplification."

M: The True Facts

By Harold Schechter and David Everitt

"In the early 1930s, serial-killer thrillers were a rarity. In fact, the term "serial murder" would not even be coined until some forty years later. But the great German director Fritz Lang was a cinematic pioneer, and in the 1931 film M, he tackled the nearly unprecedented themes of sexual obsession and homicidal mania. He cast a young Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert, one of the most unsettling fictional murderers ever created, a man driven by twisted passions to strangle small children. When devising this character, Lang did not have to use a great deal of imagination. "