“Stop snoring! You’ll wake up the lice.”

Being one of the oldest movies I’ve ever seen up to this point, I thought M was a mostly interesting little crime thriller that was actually pretty ahead of its time in a way. What drew me to it was its premise: a child murderer is on the loose, which is attracting a lot of police attention and thus worries the mob. To prevent being caught simply due to all the police surveillance, the mob takes things into their own hands by going after the murderer themselves.

While it isn’t really all that intense nowadays, I can certainly see the many different aspects present here that you might see in a modern thriller, which I thought was pretty cool. Examples include two different sides going after the same thing (aka “who will get what they want first?”), the main criminal caught in a trap with nowhere to go (seemingly), and many more. It’s pretty obvious that the thriller genre, and even a little bit of the crime drama, has taken a lot of inspiration from this film ever since.

It also has some really solid acting for the time - for the most part (we’ll get to that later). Honestly, my favorite parts of the film were probably when people were just talking in a room because of how clever and well-written the dialogue was. It doesn’t really hold a candle to other classic movies, say Casablanca, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad by any stretch. The best part of dialogue in M actually occurs during my least favorite segment of the story, being the end.

Going back to what I said a second ago, I was thoroughly impressed by the acting. The people who portrayed the mob as a whole, I thought, did an excellent job, so much so that I would still say it holds up to this day. Were they very deep or, I don’t know, remarkable performances? No, but they certainly did the job, and did it really well to serve the story. While the movie itself wasn’t super thrilling by today’s standards, you can certainly feel the sense of urgency the mob had to get this situation taken care of before the police got to it, and perhaps, got to them.

And while this definitely isn’t Citizen Kane, there were still some pretty neat shots here and there that have also aged quite well. The camera movement wasn’t all that great for the most part and could even oftentimes be a little distracting, but plenty of individual shots themselves were composited nicely, particularly when it comes to blocking and establishing shots. This was the element of M that I found to be the most surprising for me, personally, and maybe the main thing besides the plot itself, which I’ll get to in a second, that I think was the most ahead of its time.

As you can tell by the premise, this leans far into the crime thriller genre and feels far more sophisticated than I was expecting. It’s not really complex by any means, but was definitely a lot less simplistic than other movies from the decade and earlier, a comparison example being a movie that came out way later in the decade, The Wizard of Oz. As I said, though, it’s not so ahead of its time when it comes to its plot that I would call it revolutionary, but it still took a bigger step in that direction than most films from this era, particularly the early “talkie” movie period, where movies were beginning to have sound.

I wasn’t really the biggest fan of M, though, to be honest, for two different reasons. The first one, and probably the smaller of the two, was the third act, which probably sounds weird since I just said the dialogue was at its best at the end. Yes, it has good dialogue, but it’s one of those films (to me) that feels like it ended at a good spot, but then decided to go on for another twenty five to thirty minutes. For the most part, I thought the pacing was rather good up until this point.

My biggest criticism is going to be a really controversial one, and that is Peter Lorre’s acting. I liked him in his smaller role in Casablanca, but I think he was way too over the top in M. I get that this was a vastly different period for acting, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was constantly distracted by his performance. He was constantly making these exaggerated facial expressions throughout, and it made it really hard to take much of what was going on very seriously. Honestly, this probably would have been bumped up an entire two scores to a seven out of ten instead of a five if it weren’t for his performance. The film also does this thing where it tries to get you to feel bad for him by the end, but I simply didn’t because it pretty much came out of nowhere.

Overall, I was certainly a little underwhelmed by M, but I can also very easily see why people love it today.