I'd been wanting to see the German crime melodrama "M" (1931) ever since I was a kid reading about it in books about horror movies. (It's not a horror movie, per se, but it was an important film in terms of storytelling and cinematography.) In a nutshell, Peter Lorre plays a child serial killer. Directed by Fritz Lang, who also did "Metropolis," as well as a lot of American film noir.
Anyway: I caught "M" on TCM. It's a great, great movie. But I was blown away by how much smoking there is in this film -- very few cigarettes, but tons of cigars and pipes. And there are some scenes where maybe eight men are all puffing away so hard that it's difficult to see the actors! I can't recall ever seeing another film that was so filled with tobacco smoke.
If you seek it out, definitely look for the German-language version (with subtitles) and make sure it's a fairly recent version; it fell into the public domain in the 60s/70s, and there are lots of terrible copies out there. But it was renewed/restored in 2009. That's the version that TCM shows, and that's the version available on Blu-ray. (There's also an English-language version that was shot at the same time, but Fritz Lang wasn't involved with that production at all.)
It's a rather bleak picture of daily German life. But Lang, who also wrote the script, has said that was his intention. He wanted to capture the mood of the German people in 1931, when the Nazi party was beginning to come to power. He must have done a great job, because Hitler banned the film several years later and locked it away, where it stayed until 1966.
Bob
Anyway: I caught "M" on TCM. It's a great, great movie. But I was blown away by how much smoking there is in this film -- very few cigarettes, but tons of cigars and pipes. And there are some scenes where maybe eight men are all puffing away so hard that it's difficult to see the actors! I can't recall ever seeing another film that was so filled with tobacco smoke.
If you seek it out, definitely look for the German-language version (with subtitles) and make sure it's a fairly recent version; it fell into the public domain in the 60s/70s, and there are lots of terrible copies out there. But it was renewed/restored in 2009. That's the version that TCM shows, and that's the version available on Blu-ray. (There's also an English-language version that was shot at the same time, but Fritz Lang wasn't involved with that production at all.)
It's a rather bleak picture of daily German life. But Lang, who also wrote the script, has said that was his intention. He wanted to capture the mood of the German people in 1931, when the Nazi party was beginning to come to power. He must have done a great job, because Hitler banned the film several years later and locked it away, where it stayed until 1966.
Bob
.gif)
