Peter Lorre is a serial murderer of prepubescent girls in Fritz Lang’s absorbing German classic. The public here is frightened, the police are desperate, and even the criminal underworld wants Lorre’s head on a platter. At the same time that the police step up their efforts to catch him, so do the criminals, as shown in a great sequence that cuts back-and-forth between the two separate, parallel meetings in smoke-filled rooms. Naturally, the crooks are a bit more effective. The story culminates with a strikingly mature, complex, and open-ended debate over Lorre’s mental illness.
A cinematically fascinating film, you could study this one for days. It’s one of those great early talkies—Lang’s first sound film—in which silent film visual economy collides with exciting and artful use of sound. Check out how Lang uses Lorre’s whistling to tell us what he’s thinking, an effect that would’ve been impossible just a few years previous.
Many texts claim that Lang and his writers based the story on Dusseldorf serial killer and blood-drinker Peter Kurten, who was active in the 1920s and executed in 1931. However, Lang always denied this.