I can't understand someone not understanding this film, or considering it as anything less than masterful. I saw it on the big screen, and it left me, like its more illustrious predecessor, profoundly disturbed. In fact, David Wayne's "M" is more frightening than Peter Lorre's--Lorre was a brilliant actor, but his rather idiosyncratic appearance makes it easy to tag him as a "monster", and it typecast him as a perverse (and fascinating!) villain for most of his career. David Wayne not only turns in an harrowing and sympathetic (!) performance in this underrated masterpiece, but he does it with a face as bland and Midwestern as Wonder Bread. His casting, and Losey's change of locale and lighting to working class, sun-drenched and sun-faded shots of L.A., make the crimes and the criminal too believable, too naturalistic for comfort. Murder is more frightening in broad daylight than in shadows, where we've been taught to expect it. There are outstanding moments here: Losey's double-coded messages about the female body (the mannequin scene), which--despite lines inserted to please the censors--indicate that sex is behind the child-murders, the incredible hunt in the wonderful Bradbury Building, even a few comedic one liners (when the hapless police force shake up a low-class joint, and they ask the patrons what they're doing in the place, a bum replies, "Slummin'!") But it is the conclusion, the gut-wrenching final "courtroom" scene with David Wayne giving the most realistic, disturbing and moving portrait of psychopathy on the screen, that cements this film as a classic worthy of standing up to its predecessor. And when his "lawyer" questions the mob--and himself, and the viewers--as to who was truly responsible for this man and his evil, the answer is always disturbing. Losey believed that "it takes a village" fifty years ago, and his "M" remains a brand-hot indictment of a corrupt and money-hungry, perverse and puritanical, escapist and scapegoating society.
