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On the data. One film, and it is doing several things nobody had done before. It was Fritz Lang's first sound film and he used sound sparingly and structurally: long stretches are silent, and the recurring whistle is used to identify a character who is off screen, which no one had tried. Peter Lorre could not whistle; the whistling is Lang. The final sequence, a trial of the murderer by the criminals of Berlin, is where the film turns from a manhunt into an argument about whether a man who cannot stop himself can be guilty. Lorre's speech is the reason the film is still shown. It is often read as a portrait of a society about to accept mob justice, which in Germany in 1931 is not a stretch. Lang left for America in 1933; the Nazis banned the film. Lang said for years that it was based on the Dusseldorf killer Peter Kurten, and later said it was not, which is one of several things he told different versions of. Peter Lorre was twenty-six and almost unknown.

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