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Fritz Lang made his first sound picture about a murderer and then refused to show a single murder. Elsie Beckmann dies offscreen, registered only by her abandoned ball and a balloon caught in telephone wires, a choice Lang later explained as forcing every viewer to supply the horror privately. Hans Beckert then vanishes for long stretches. The middle belongs to police procedure, to fingerprints and handwriting analysis, and to the underworld bosses who launch a rival manhunt because the raids are ruining business. Peter Lorre barely carries the film until his closing plea. Since Lorre could not whistle, Lang dubbed the Grieg tune that keeps giving the killer away. Getting it made was almost as tense. After Lang advertised his next project under the title Mörder unter uns, threatening mail arrived and the Staaken studio refused him space; its head, a Nazi Party member, suspected the film was about the party. Inspector Lohmann was not invented either, but drawn from Ernst Gennat, the real head of the Berlin homicide squad. A good fit if you want a manhunt told from the hunters outward, ending in a kangaroo court that argues capital punishment instead of settling it. Not for anyone who needs the killer onscreen throughout, or who reads long silences and procedural detail as dead weight.