Difficult Directors: Joseph Losey, Part 1

M (1931) is considered an unsurpassable classic, directed by Fritz Lang and starred Peter Lorre. It seems inevitable that director Joseph Losey would be tasked to remake the film in 1951. It’s a no-win project. The shadow of Lang’s M doesn’t merely cast a shadow over, even eclipse Losey’s, no , it swallows the remake whole, removes the Americanized version from memory, and takes the film beyond oblivion.

Almost.

Memory of its existence only pounds it into dust more. Only who has seen it? No one. When has it been shown on Turner Classic Movies? As far as I know, never. While several Losey movies can be seen on You Tube, M has one three and a half minute sequence available.

I searched for years on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other sources for DVDs. Not until three months ago did I find an available copy from CD Universe, for six dollars. The price was low enough I took a chance that it wasn’t a Region 2 product that didn’t work in USA players. The order took four weeks to arrive. And I waited three weeks before watching it.

Briefly, the thriller deals with a serial child molester-killer. He has paralyzed the city with fear. The cops are stumped, as well as pressured to arrest someone. The police come down heavily on the criminal underworld, hoping their perpetrator belongs to it. Soon, the top criminal minds decide to go after the killer, using their endemic methods of communication and watchfulness in all quarters of urban Los Angeles. The race between the police and criminals is won by the latter, who bring the killer, played by David Wayne, to an underground garage. The criminal masses assemble and call for blood. A discredited lawyer (Luther Adler) is forced to defend the man. Wayne, meanwhile, pleads for mercy, blaming his inability to control his urges.

The tawdry content, the difficult moral stances, the shifting allegiance of the audience, all are hallmarks of Losey films. This is what makes him ‘difficult’, at least, one way. We’ll learn later about several others, but first I want to elaborate on M.

I too was skeptical that a remake could do the original justice. And I don’t want to compare the films if only because Losey’s M stands on its own. It manages this by remaining close to the original script but taking a different tack on the murder. Peter Lorre made his career with M and soon was in Hollywood, never quite equaling his great performance, save for his Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon (1941).

Losey chose an actor, David Wayne, who never played this type of role before or after. He is best known for light comedy, playing backup to the likes of Tracy and Hepburn in Adam’s Rib (1949), Bacall and Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953), and Sinatra and Reynolds in The Tender Trap (1955). He’s also the beleaguered husband in The Three Faces of Eve (1957).

Like the original, we don’t see him for the first part of the film except for shot over his shoulder. Finally, we’re take into his apartment room where he exhibits sexual tension, if not release, while he “gets off” fondling the shoestrings from his victims. The sexual suggestion from his actions is dense and should have been blatant to the public – apparently the Hayes Office didn’t understand the parallel created between his fetish and what he actually does to the children (offscreen).

The film is immensely helped by a great array of supporting actors. The principal police investigators are Howard da Silva (Ben Franklin in 1776) and Steve Brodie (Mitchum’s partner in Out of the Past). The mayor, who throws all responsibility on the police is Jim Backus, a character who played the spineless American male well (James Dean’s father in Rebel Without a Cause). The police aren’t incompetent and eventually track down the killer through their own investigation and imagination, but they can’t keep up with the criminal personalities.

The criminal mastermind, the man who understands how they might find the child killer, is Martin Gabel. He’s the progenitor of the corporate criminal audiences would see in The Racket (1951) and The Big Sleep (1953). He commands a hardened, seemingly barely literate crew, led by burly Raymond Burr (a noir sadist in Raw Deal), who plays Pottsy, a bully roughing up anyone giving him lip. In addition, there’s Glenn Anders (best known for his extremely eccentric role in The Lady from Shanghai), and Norman Lloyd (seen falling from the top of the Statue of Liberty in Hitchcock’s Saboteur)

M, in both versions, is less about the murders than about society’s response. All actions become suspicious. A man helps a child is suddenly surrounded by a crowd and in mortal danger for his life. The seams of civil behavior unravel; hence, the strong police reaction. Then the criminal reaction to the cops strong arming them.

It’s also a film about vengeance. It seems easy to want the killer’s death. He’s indefensible. Until someone defends him. Then it’s not so obvious to kill him. The ground for capital punishment never seems shakier than in this film. Especially when the criminals defend their own actions relative to the child murderer’s. Who better to serve as his moral executioner? He who is with some sin, including murder, can cast the first stone. Yet, the film doesn’t present a rigid stance. You either see the complications of being an executioner or you don’t.

Some have seen the film as a backdoor allegory for witch hunts – of all kinds. An easy approach, considering that Losey left the United States for good, as a filmmaker, in 1951. He was being forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He would have to name names or go to jail. He had little wiggle room. M and his other four American films, although not radical, critically examined capitalism and social injustice in American society. You may have heard or seen some of these (they’ve been on TCM):

The Boy with Green Hair (1948)

The Lawless (1950)

The Prowler (1951)

The Big Night (1951)

Two of these films anticipate M’s concerns. The Boy with Green Hair stars Dean Stockwell and Pat O’Brien. Stockwell’s character, Peter, is a war orphan who wakes up one day with green hair, becomes obsessed with world peace and the fate of other war orphans, and refuses to cut his hair in defiance  of a brutal, war-like age. The film overcomes its sentimentality and the obvious symbol of non-conformity, partly due to the intensity of Stockwell’s campaign. As well, we can line up against those who demand that he cut his hair. When the deed is done, those who clamored the most to get the boy back to normal feel the greatest shame. The film foreshadows a time fifteen years later when our society worried about the hair of four British rockers; hair became a means to torment stodgy parents and civil authorities.

Losey followed this modest success with The Lawless, a hard take on racial injustice, specifically (talk about things never changing) discrimination and violence against Mexican immigrants. In this film, the violence rises from townspeople enforcing what one critic calls “a meaningless standard of conformity.” Instead of wanting to cut hair, the people riot, destroying a newspaper that refused to be anti-immigrant.

Losey will pursue these themes the rest of his career; unfortunately, he had to leave the United States because he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He had good reason. He was a Communist and he knew other Communists. He didn’t want to name names or go to jail. He never made another film in the U.S. His explanation for joining the Party in 1946 was this:

I had a feeling that I was being useless in Hollywood, that I’d been cut off from New York activity and I felt that my existence was unjustified. It was a kind of Hollywood guilt that led me into that kind of commitment. And I think that the work that I did on a much freer, more personal and independent basis for the political left in New York, before going to Hollywood, was much more valuable socially.

He made 27 more films before dying in 1984.