A City Hunting Itself

Children are disappearing in a German city and the police response is to raid everything, which ruins business for the organised underworld. So the criminals form their own investigative bureau, deputise the beggars' union to watch every street corner, and catch the killer the police cannot. Lang cuts the two manhunts together as parallel bureaucracies with identical methods and different letterheads. Peter Lorre, twenty six and previously a comic stage actor, plays Hans Beckert as something more upsetting than a monster: a soft, panicked man who describes his own compulsion as a pursuit he cannot stop. It was Lang's first sound film and he used silence as aggressively as noise, letting long stretches run without audio and then hanging the entire identification of the killer on a tune he whistles when the urge arrives.