A simple, haunting musical phrase whistled offscreen tells us that a young girl will be killed. “Who Is the Murderer?” pleads a nearby placard as serial killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) closes in on little Elsie Beckmann . . . In his harrowing masterwork M, Fritz Lang merges trenchant social commentary with chilling suspense, creating a panorama of private madness and public hysteria that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.
SPECIAL FEATURES
New, restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
Audio commentary by German film scholars Anton Kaes, author of the BFI Film Classics volume on M, and Eric Rentschler, author of The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife
The long-lost English-language version of M, from a nitrate print preserved by the British Film Institute (Blu-ray only)
Conversation with Fritz Lang, a 50-minute film by William Friedkin
Claude Chabrol’s M le maudit, a short film inspired by M, plus a video interview with Chabrol about Lang's filmmaking techniques
Video interview with Harold Nebenzal, son of M producer Seymour Nebenzal
Classroom audiotapes of editor Paul Falkenberg discussing the film and its history, set to clips from the film
Documentary on the physical history of M, from production to distribution to digital restoration
Galleries of behind-the-scenes photographs and production sketches
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: An essay by film critic Stanley Kauffmann, a 1963 interview with Lang, and, for the Blu-ray edition, the script for a missing scene and three contemporaneous newspaper articles
New cover by Sarah Habibi
