All of which it seems to me you could just as easily give up if you had learned something useful, or if you had jobs, or if you weren't such lazy pigs. Proud you can crack a safe or sneak into houses or cheat at cards. help it! What would you know? What are you talking about? Who are you anyway? Who are you? All of you. Perhaps improbably, we even feel for Lorre, as he says he's sick, in what is one of the great scenes in film: We feel for the mob when they voice their concern that he will simply serve a little time in a mental institution, then be back on the street again and kill again. We have an unruly mob confronting a child killer, where both sides are reprehensible. The scene of Lorre seeing them all staring at him as Lang has the camera pan slowly from left to right is brilliant, as is his own statement in self-defense shortly afterward. The ultimate scene showing Lorre confronted by a mob intent on killing him after a mock trial redeems the film, however, and is riveting. I have to also say that when the mob have found him holed up in a building and don't just call the police instead painstakingly going through the rooms, it seems like a plot hole, since from their perspective all they need is to get the police off the streets. At one point we do see Lorre nearly salivating at the sight of a child's reflection in the window of a shop he's looking into, and at another, him trying to lure in his next victim, but he's simply not on-screen enough. Instead, he shows us the surveillance network of beggars and focuses too much on procedure. Unfortunately the movie gets a little bogged down in its middle portion, when Lang could have shown us other sinister acts from Lorre or at built some type of backstory in his characters. He does do a fantastic job at establishing a dark feel to the film throughout, and is brilliant when he cuts the sound a few times, letting the action speak for itself, which is heightened because of the darkness of it all. The police and mob are barely distinguishable as they both discuss the matter over cigars and alcohol in separate meetings as Lang flips back and forth between them, and perhaps that's one of his larger points about Germany at the time. In a very heavy-handed way they begin putting heat on the street and in pubs, asking for papers and rounding people up for little reason, motivating an organized crime ring to get involved to find the killer themselves and get things back to normal. While the police are shown at work with some early examples of forensics - fingerprints, handwriting analysis, and sifting through physical evidence in concentric circles around the crime scene - the overall picture of them is unflattering. Peter Lorre is brilliant in the role of the killer, setting the tone early on as director Fritz Lang cuts to him looking in the mirror, and, like a child, distorting his face to look monstrous, while the police are talking about the psychological profile of a killer. The first question you might find yourself asking while watching this movie is just where the hell is the 'stranger danger'? Despite the news of a serial killer preying on children in the news for a long time, we still see children on the street alone, and one easily lured in with candy and treats.
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