M

Remaking Fritz Lang's M from 1931 looked impossible on paper. Joseph Losey did it anyway, moving the action from Berlin to Los Angeles. David Wayne plays the child murderer, with Howard da Silva, Luther Adler and Martin Gabel filling out the cast. Losey holds to Lang's structure but turns the city and its architecture into something else entirely, and the sequences in the Bradbury Building are unmistakably his. The history around the film cannot be separated from it. It was produced independently, released by Columbia in March 1951. That same month Losey appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, took the Fifth, and was blacklisted immediately. Howard da Silva, Luther Adler and Karen Morley from the cast met the same fate. Losey never worked in America again; he moved to England and built the rest of his career there. So this is among the last things a director made in his own country, and its portrait of a lynch mob reads differently now. Who it is for: film noir enthusiasts and anyone curious about Losey's American period. Who it is not for: viewers expecting it to stand against Lang's original.