Well, it took quite a "Weilchen", a whole seventy years in fact, for me to realise that this little ditty which we quite often sang when I was still knee-high to a grasshopper was actually connected to the Fritz-Lang movie "M".
Long before "Psycho", "The Silence of the Lamb" or "Se7en", this far-ahead-of-its-time German film struck fear into viewers' hearts with its tale of a child-killer at loose in the city, and it has remained the blueprint for all serial killer movies ever since. Many of its images, such as a missing child’s balloon stuck in telephone lines or Beckert discovering an M (for ‘murderer’) chalked on his shoulder, remain genuinely iconic.
Fritz Lang was an extraordinary filmmaker and his CV is littered with classics – the "Mabuse" films (1922, 1932, 1960), "Metropolis" (1927), "Fury" (1936), "The Woman in the Window" (1944), "Scarlet Street" (1945), "The Big Heat" (1953) and "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" and "While the City Sleeps" (both 1956) are merely the best known, with "M" perhaps best-known of all.
After leaving Germany for France when the Nazis came to power and settling in the USA in 1935 (where he died in 1976, aged 85), Lang buoyed his anti-Nazi credentials with the Hitler-assassination thriller "Manhunt" (1941) and the Bertolt Brecht collaboration "Hangmen Also Die" (1943) which depicts Gestapo agents hunting Reinhardt Heydrich's killer in occupied Prague.
It's a grey and overcast morning. It's not really cold but I've lit the fire anyway just for company as Padma has gone into the Bay for a bit of shopping. I'm about to watch "M" again, if only to remind myself of what I used to be singing all those years ago in another life in another country.
