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Pabst's Pandora's Box is perhaps a closer model than the Hitchcock original, though Lang's M also figures in the opening composition of wanted poster and blind man. A high-angled tracking shot surveys cobblestone streets carpeted by fog, 19th-century London via 20th-Century Fox, it cranes down to the first killing just behind a back alley. (Hands in water are the recurring image, lifeless ones in the gutter and guilty ones in the Thames.) The adjusted Ripper mythos replaces prostitutes with thespians young and old, he (Laird Cregar) is a hulking pathologist of "irregular habits," installed in a Montagu Square attic. "A very curious fellow" to the landlady (Sara Allgood) and her husband (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), "deranged" to the Scotland Yard inspector (George Sanders) on the case, "a little lost" to the music-hall chanteuse (Merle Oberon). A black valise of slashing paraphernalia for the culprit, for John Brahm there's Cregar's baleful bulk and Lucien Ballard painting with gaslight and silhouettes. Murder as a miniaturist's art, Baudelairean themes to be shared with Sirk's Lured: "Yours is a beauty that could destroy men... Or it could destroy you." "Oh, you are prejudiced against actresses, aren't you?" The down-and-out showgirl (Helena Pickard) receives a grisly farewell, a subjective camera on the horrified barfly (Doris Lloyd) anticipates a Hammer specialty. Romantic chatter at the "Black Museum" (death masks, nooses and hatchets abound), the dancer interrupts the lodger by his furnace and a fireplace poker is raised menacingly, or arousedly. ("Cutting out the evil" is the simple solution for the psychopath who quotes Solomon.) Chabrol on the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma preferred Brahm's Hangover Square, and yet there's the unmistakable reconfiguration of Le Boucher. With Queenie Leonard, Aubrey Mather, and David Clyde. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |