A few years back, Tina Fey delivered one of the all-time great zingers when she reported on Saturday Night Live that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez might star in a remake of Casablanca and predicted the new release would be “the perfect film for people who liked the original but wished it was terrible.”
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One can hardly write off the 1951 version, however, because it was directed by Joseph Losey, a gifted filmmaker in his own right and a man smart enough to know what a thankless job he’d taken on. Born in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and educated at Dartmouth College, Losey was a young man looking for theater work in Munich when he first saw M in 1931. Since then he’d traveled to the Soviet Union, where he staged Clifford Odets’s proletarian play Waiting for Lefty; made a name for himself in New York with a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, starring Charles Laughton; and gotten his start in Hollywood with idiosyncratic movies like the antiwar parable The Boy With Green Hair (1948) and the perverse mystery The Prowler (1951). Seymour Nebenzal, producer of the original M, had—like Lang and Lorre—fled the Third Reich and settled in Hollywood, where he came up with the idea of transplanting the story from Berlin to LA. Losey initially turned down Nebenzal’s offer to direct the remake, then accepted the assignment because he needed money—only to find that Lang was openly hostile to the project.
Whether Lang or von Harbou deserves the credit, the storytelling in M is so purely visual that one can follow long stretches of it with the sound turned down. Watching the remake, I was struck by how humbly Losey bows to the shot sequence of the original. In the original M‘s famous opening, a mother in her kitchen glances at the wall clock; meanwhile her little daughter wanders home from school alone. The girl bounces a ball as she walks, and a nice man, his face unseen, befriends her, buying her a balloon from a blind street vendor. Growing fearful, the mother calls down the stairwell, turned into a vortex by a camera shooting straight downward. Medium shots show the little girl’s empty place setting at the kitchen table, and the abandoned ball rolling to a halt; a long shot reveals the balloon caught in the telephone wires. Losey copies this entire sequence; there are some minor adjustments (he inserts a shot looking back up the stairwell at the mother, and reverses the order of the rolling ball and drifting balloon), but they only remind you how beautifully conceived the original was.
When the M remake was released, Lang showed up at a promotional screening and got into a shouting match with Nebenzal; according to film scholar Thomas Elsaesser, Lang “was not prepared to acknowledge” Losey as a member of the directing profession. Before long, though, Losey had much bigger problems than being on Fritz Lang’s shit list: three months after M was released, he left the United States for Europe to escape being subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which wanted him to explain his past membership in the Communist Party; subsequently, he enjoyed a long career in Britain and France but he never worked in America again. Three of his players on M—Howard Da Silva, Martin Gabel, and Luther Adler—were blacklisted, and M was greeted by right-wing picketers in Los Angeles that October. Everyone who lays a hand on the story seems to wind up running for his life.
Directed by Joseph Losey University of Chicago professor Tom Gunning introduces the screening Wed 11/6, 7:30 PM Patio 6008 W. Irving Park 773-685-4291patiotheater.net
