Blogical Conclusion

CHILD’S PLAY

JAN 10, 2009 – SOMEWHAT GRUESOMELY PREFIGURING A STORY about children who are silenced forever, a little girl’s voice opens Fritz Lang’s M. “Just you wait a little while,” she chants over a black screen that has yet to yield the film’s first image, and continues, “The nasty man in black will come.” The black screen fades into the girl surrounded by children that she’s pointing to in turn, stabbing in their direction after each word of her singsong rhyme. “With his little chopper, he will chop you up,” she concludes, and informs the child whose person she is pointing to at the end, “You’re out.” The camera slowly tilts upwards, taking in a railing on the balcony of an apartment, over which rows of clothes are hung out to dry.

A woman with a laundry basket pauses upon hearing snatches of the rhyme that drift up towards her. She walks to the railing and yells at the little girl below, “Stop singing that awful song.” The chanting stops – and yet, the woman continues, “Don’t you hear me?” Then, realising that her words have already had their intended effect, she hauls in her basket and goes her way, muttering, “Always that awful song!” And the minute she recedes from view, the little girl pipes up again, “Just you wait a little while, the nasty man in black will come.” But we hear only her voice. The camera doesn’t return to observe the children, preferring instead to continue to stare at the railing and the clothes on the line.

An instant later, we see the top of a staircase, embraced by the angled edge of the banister. Soon, the woman with the laundry comes into view, panting as she heaves her load upstairs. She rings the doorbell. The door opens. She hands over the basket to Frau Beckmann (Ellen Widmann) and wipes her brow. Frau Beckmann asks what the matter is. “I told those kids to stop singing that awful song,” the woman exclaims. “But they keep singing it over and over. As if we haven’t heard enough of that murderer.” This is the first we hear of Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre), the nasty man in black, the serial killer who preys on children.

“Oh, leave them be,” says Frau Beckmann, in what appears to be fond indulgence. But soon, we see there’s a core of steel to that advice, as she continues, “If they’re singing, at least we know they’re okay.” She deposits the laundry in a far corner of the room and continues to scrub away at dirty clothes. She glances towards the stove, towards the smoke from a dish she’s preparing for her daughter who will be back from school any moment. The cuckoo clock announces that this moment is near. Frau Beckmann smiles and wipes her hand clean of soap suds.

Meanwhile, anxious parents wait at the entrance to the school. Back at home, Frau Beckmann heads to the stove and stirs the pot. She takes a sip and smiles. The treat for her daughter is shaping up exactly according to plan. Over by the school, Elsie Beckmann (Inge Landgut) almost gets run over by a car, as she bids goodbye to her schoolmates. She hastily steps back on the curb, her small hands clutching what is surely a hammering heart. A policeman strolls over to help. He holds aloft a beefy arm and halts the oncoming traffic. He grasps Elsie’s hand and helps her cross the road.

Over here, Frau Beckmann lays out the table with two sets of plates, two sets of napkins. Over there, Elsie bounces a ball as she walks home. She pauses by a pillar and bounces her ball off it, off a poster that announces, “10,000 marks reward! Who is the murderer?” The ball keeps bouncing off the writing as we continue to read, “Since June 11, little Klaus Klawitzky and his sister Klara have disappeared. Evidence leads us to believe the children were a victim of a similar crime committed last fall, against the Doering sisters.” Elsie’s ball continues to bounce off the poster, but the letters are now covered by the shadow of a man in a broad-rimmed hat.

“What a pretty ball!” he exclaims. Bending forward, and still in shadow – “the nasty man in black” – he asks Elsie, “What’s your name?” Back at home, Frau Beckmann hears the pounding of little footsteps and heads to the door. “Did Elsie come with you?” she asks two little girls, who reply that Elsie did not. Shaking her head, Frau Beckmann goes in. “Elsie,” she screams, “Elsie.” Her increasingly strident voice echoes down the floors of the empty staircase, across the empty attic space, and over the empty dinner plate. A second later, she gets her answer, through a shot befitting a talkie from an age that hadn’t yet turned cynical about the symbolism of silent film: Elsie’s pretty ball rolls out of a patch of bedraggled bushes, with no hand to guide its course.

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