Notes on Fritz Lang's "M"

The movie “M”
Fritz Lang
Notes

First sound film, last German film

little kids playing a game in the beginning, Mom doesn’t like the song and yells at them to stop something about a man in black with his cleaver will get you ... like duck duck goose or eenie meenie minie moe and one person gets out at a time song is about the Child Murderer - he is all over the news
“at least if they’re singing we know they’re still there”
Elsie Beckmann - little girl singing in beginning guy sees her on the street, asks her name, buys her a balloon, she doesn’t go home for dinner
Mom is calling her name over and over again, showing her echo go farther and farther to emphasize emptiness - she is nowhere ball is in the yard, balloon the man bought her is seen caught in telephone wire
Anxiety is in public, start accusing one another starts fights between friends, riots in the city
Murderer writes a letter to the paper saying proceed with your investigations, I am not done yet. analyzing his handwriting and fingerprints saying that the murderer is insane
Investigation is not going successful because they have so little to go on
Police raiding an underground bar
Bald guy with bug eyes seen in the mirror when describing the murderer as crazy, hiding behind a coat rack when the bar is raided
Smokes a cig when being searched
Almost gets away but is then sent to the precinct
Is he the murderer?
Now everyone is afraid of the police because they are everywhere so they have no privacy
Mob is trying to get involved, find the murderer and kill him before the police do
Want to use beggars to follow children and the lure the murderer to them so the mob can find him sending them out to their own quadrants to watch for the murderer street corners, yards, etc
List of addresses one of the women is hard of hearing, husband just stepped out, go to look around the house something about a wooden table - where the killer wrote the letter to the newspaper with red pencil?