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Pretty Good

People are voting emotionally.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It's unfortunate that this film gets compared to the original Fritz Lang masterpiece as it is an excellent film in its own right. David Wayne turns in a great performance as the child killer. The location shots in Los Angeles are excellent, especially in the oft used Bradbury Building. Well worth viewing.

The poster for director Joseph Losey's M promises to deliver "the greatest motion picture you've ever seen!". This, of course, isn't true; in fact, it isn't even the great motion picture entitled M you'll ever see. The original movie of the same title, directed by Fritz Lang, is possibly one of the finest pieces of cinema ever made, and one that reflected the political turmoil of Germany at the time as the Weimar Republic start to collapse under the increasing power of the Nazis. Douglas Sirk, a German working in Hollywood, was first approached to helm the remake, but wanted to scrap the original premise but keep the focus on a notorious child-killer. This could not happen, as such a grisly topic was banned in Hollywood, but would be allowed if it was a remake of a classic. Sirk held his ground, and so M was handed to Losey instead.Martin W. Harrow (David Wayne) is a reclusive serial killer who has already gained notoriety throughout the city after a few dead bodies were found, minus their shoes. Inspector Carney (Howard Da Silva) feels the pressure of expectation, resorting to desperate measures by fleecing the regulars at a known criminal hangout in the hope of stumbling upon a clue or lead, as the city's residents are in high- paranoia mode, reporting anyone acting remotely suspicious or seen walking with a child. One old man is hauled in after helping a young girl take her skates off after a fall. Syndicate boss Charlie Marshall (Martin Gabel), seeking an opportunity to divert the attention away from his own criminal activities, rounds up his gang of crooks and brings in drunken lawyer Dan Langley (Luther Adler) in the hope of tracking down the murderer himself. Any American remakes of foreign masterpieces will always be looked upon with some degree of disdain, and I must admit that I went into M expecting a pointless re-hash of what came before. However, under the disguise of a film noir, Losey's M is a damn good movie, with the panic-stricken city eager to turn over their neighbour in the hope of sleeping easy at night easily comparable with Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch-hunts terrorising Hollywood at the time, which saw industry giants pressured into naming names and exiling their co-workers onto the Blacklist. As Harrow, Wayne is subtly effective, sweet-talking his victims and luring them with his whistle. More focus is given to his character than in Lang's film, and Wayne manages to invite more sympathy than Peter Lorre's incarnation as he is eventually hauled in front of a public jury. It certainly doesn't have the dramatic weight or technical wizardry of the 1931 version, but Losey's effort stands out as one of the most gripping noirs of its era.

As an IMDb prolific reviewer I have no objection to the passion shown by other members in comparing this Americanization to the original. I get it.The problem is that, leaving the backstory of the production aside, this is a superb film from a decade not otherwise known for superb films.First I was lucky to catch a new cut of the film in top quality shown on HD TV in 2016. For those fans who complained about poor VHS copies, again, I feel your pain.Again, if you can stand to rate this film on its own, it is brilliant.The story. Some 15 years before the mob and the authorities would get together for real (JFK) here you have a story that captures your imagination. What if it was in the mob's interest to do a job that no one else wanted to do ... or could do? The acting is top notch, especially since there are few big names in the cast, even by 50s standards. Raymond Burr playing a thug is a treat.The script is hypnotizing. The writer just let the subject matter tell itself.However at the end of the day it is the direction and cinematography that capture the viewer. A few more films like this and you can almost make an argument for going back to B&W prints.The subtext is awesome. I found myself thinking of the original French version of Beauty and the Beast (LA BELLE ET LA BETE.) How many movies can give you in the very same film the best and the worst of our species? Amazing and recommended.

In the original version of "M" made in 1931, as well as in the remake of 1951, a city is plagued by a man who is killing children. The police become so relentless in their pursuit of the killer that the ordinary way of life of the criminal underclass becomes disrupted. As a result, the criminals take matters into their own hands, capture the child killer, and have a trial of sorts, during which he tells everyone that he is compulsively driven to do what he does. Before the mob can do anything to him, the police show up and take him away.In the 1931 movie, it is never explicitly stated that the children are sexually molested, but it is implied, and in any event, we would automatically assume as much anyway. In the remake, however, the movie goes out of its way to make it clear that the children are not molested. While a crowd watches the chief of police on television warning parents about the child killer, someone in the crowd asks, "What's he mean the children were neither violated nor outraged?" Someone else in the crowd responds, "What's the difference? He killed them, didn't he?"Well, it may not make any difference to the people in the crowd, but apparently it must have made a difference to the Production Code Administration. It was not sufficient merely to omit all reference to sexual molestation. It had to be explicitly denied. At the same time, all of the killer's victims are little girls, which would indicate a sexual preference. Presumably, just in case the audience refused to believe sex was not involved, the producers went the extra step to avoid any hint of homosexuality. The killer takes the shoes of his victims, which suggests a fetish, which in turn suggests a sexual perversion. Furthermore, in one scene, a man and wife are informed that their child has been a victim. As they start to leave, the woman turns around in desperation and says that maybe it is a mistake, that the child is someone else's. We can only conclude from this that there was no body in the morgue for them to identify, that the police were only going by the doll and the girl's dress, which are on the chief's desk. He holds up the dress for her to look at, which she recognizes as belonging to her daughter. From this we can only conclude one thing: the killer took off the girl's clothes, and her naked body is yet to be found. Still, we are supposed to believe that sex is not the motive for these murders. Censorship can be confusing.It goes without saying that the original was much better, and one way in which it was better is that the killer simply had an evil impulse that he did not understand. In the remake, owing to the popularity of psychoanalysis at the time, we are given an explanation for the killer's behavior as resulting from something that happened when he was a child. As a harbinger of that explanation, we see him strangling a clay model of a child, with a picture of his elderly mother sitting right beside him, almost as if she were watching him do it. At the end, when the child killer is surrounded by the underworld figures that captured him, he gives a garbled explanation about how his father mistreated his mother, and how she raised him to believe that all men are evil. As a result, he reasons that since he is a man, then he is evil and deserves punishment. So, he has to kill little girls, partly to keep them from growing up and being mistreated by evil men, and partly so he will get caught and get the punishment he deserves. The explanation comes across as artificial, unsatisfying, and unbelievable. Fortunately, we are not told why he took the girls' shoes, which would only have made the explanation even more tortured. The remake was destined to be inferior to the original, but it would still have been a lot better movie had all that psychobabble at the end been left out.