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The city symphony begins with a nursery rhyme, a high-angled view of a circle of little girls states the formal structure for the analysis of "the nasty man in black." The murderer is a shadowy profile, a cracked whistle, Peter Lorre distorting his soft features before a mirror to see the monstrosity within. (His latest victim is one moment a curtsying child and the next an abandoned ball, her departing soul is a balloon tangled in electric wires.) "No privacy anymore," grouses another criminal, "there are more policemen on the streets now than whores," a disruption of the order of things. As in Metropolis, a vertical braiding of above and below—the mordant inspector (Otto Wernicke) and the bowler-hatted safecracker (Gustaf Gründgens) hold overlapping manhunts, a famous Brechtian joke and one of the many instances of Berlin's hard-edged geometry. Fritz Lang's masterpiece has a radical congruency of image and meaning, plus a dense soundscape like a stricken pulse. Suspicion whips up frenzied mobs, the light is harsh and the air smoky, Germany under glass in other words. "We're all law experts here." The mother's cry over the empty table, the sightless seller gripped by a familiar tune, the heavy breathing of the sad little vampire cornered in the attic of an office building. Edvard Grieg's trolls announce the sick urge, and there's the culprit in the hall of a disused distillery before the entire underworld, a jury of his peers. On his knees facing the camera, Lorre magnificently embodies the trembling human mass in the film's implacable architecture: "I have no control over this, this evil thing inside of me, the fire, the voices, the torment!" Cold and searing, the Lang gaze literally stops the revenge fantasy in its tracks and makes the verdict a maternal plea on a blank screen. After this, only Powell's Peeping Tom. Cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner. With Ellen Widmann, Inge Landgut, Theodor Loos, Friedrich Gnaß, Ernst Stahl-Nachbaur, Georg John, Fritz Odemar, Paul Kemp, Theo Lingen, Karl Platen, Rudolf Blümner, and Rosa Valetti. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |