NONFICTION
Green Apple Books, Clement Street, San Francisco  -  Photo by Charlene Anderson
From Scarlet Street on, I wanted to show that the average​ ​citizen is not very much better than a criminal. 
                                  Fritz Lang                                    
Gradually, and at times reluctantly, I have come
 to the conclusion that every human mind harbours a latent  compulsion to murder.
    Fritz Lang
I have tried to approach the murderer imaginatively to show him
as a human being possessed by some demon that has driven him beyond
the ordinary borderlines of human behaviour, and not the least part of whose tragedy is that by murder he never resolves his conflicts. 
​  Fritz Lang
​                                                                           
The Devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.
 Shakespeare 

Who Is the Murderer?
by Don Plansky
Prologue
Be careful, citizens! Be careful!
 
There’s a monster among us. It is called Caligari/Cesare. It is called Hans Beckert/Kindermörder. It is called Chris Cross.
 
It changes, adapts, puts on a new mask for the old, devolves as it grows—a Migratory Spirit in search of new worlds to terrorize and new hosts to possess.
 
It lurks within that quiet, bespectacled gentleman sitting next to you on the bus. You watch without interest as he demurely folds his Wall Street Journal. He looks like you—or me. And now the monster is a voice within you!
1
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Witness the monster’s early, crude appearance at a fair in the North German town of Holstenwall. [1]  It has assumed the shape of the somnambulist Cesare, a freakish and ghoulish creature put on display by its master, Dr. Caligari, who sends the demon out into the night to murder the innocent. For a modest fee you are privileged to step inside the Good Doctor’s tent where the carnival sleepwalker suddenly awakens from his deathlike trance to prophesize your imminent death.
 
Fritz Lang may have provided the framing story for Carl Mayer’s and Hans Janowitz’s scenario for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Wiene, through which we learn that the horror of the serial killings is a fabrication of the mind of the delusional narrator, Francis. ​[2]  Francis is an inmate in an insane asylum, along with Cesare and Francis’s “fiancée” Jane—an asylum presided over by its apparently benevolent director, Dr. Caligari, whose special area of expertise is somnambulism.
 
This framing device blunts the implied social criticism of young soldiers, in the manner of Cesare, sent off as automatons, unconscious killing machines, to the Great War. [3]  By making the pathological mind of Francis the source of the entire distorted and angular visual world of Caligari, Lang anticipates his own American nightmare noirs, The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), both starring Edward G. Robinson as the ill-starred victim and Joan Bennett as femme fatale. In Window, Professor Wanley’s (Robinson) nightmarish dream is the framing device that blunts a tale of lust, murder and suicide. As with Francis in Caligari, we come to realize that our perception of unfolding horrors has been fused with, and constrained by, a single disturbed mind.
 
We are about to enter the cinematic worlds of two of Lang’s greatest directorial achievements, M and Scarlet Street, each a nightmare vision undiluted either by the framing device of a lunatic’s ravings (Caligari) or by a mild-mannered psychology professor waking out of a bad dream (Window). We will inhabit the psyches of two men who, unlike Cesare, are unremarkable in appearance, easily lost in a crowd. They look like you—or me.
​_________________________
[1] Holstenwall is a fictional town.
[2] The precise origins and author(s) of the framing story of Caligari are disputed, although Lang was involved.
[3] Mayer and Janowitz, an officer during the war, were both avowed pacifists in the newly formed Weimar Republic (1918). Janowitz claimed that the frame story was forced upon the first-time scenarists against their will. ​
2
M
By 1931, when M, Lang’s first sound feature, was released, the Golden Age of German Cinema (1919-1933) had moved beyond the extreme expressionism of Caligari, and even beyond the intimate psychological realism of the Kammerspiel (“chamber drama”) movement, e.g., The Last Laugh (1924), directed by F. W. Murnau, into its final stage of “new realism” or objectivity (die neue Sachlichkeit), in which attempts were made, as in M, to treat current social problems in a realistic manner. Within a few years a real-life monster would rise to absolute power, effectively ending this phase of German film history. Fritz Lang, Erich Pommer, Karl Freund, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder, and other filmmakers began to flee Germany and Austria, eventually finding a home in Hollywood.
 
In M, our monster has migrated from the small provincial town of Holstenwall to the large, anonymous metropolis of Berlin. It has taken the form of the avuncular Peter Lorre, in his screen debut, as Hans Beckert. He has assumed the habits, tastes and lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. He is well-tailored, likes fruit, cognac, smokes Ariston cigarettes (a fact that puts the police on his trail), and, when stirred by the lust to rape and slaughter little girls, whistles Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from the Peer Gynt Suite. This is Beckert’s leitmotiv, revealing him as a man of considerable cultural refinement—a characteristic shared by many members of the ascending Nazi party.
 
The brilliance of Lang’s and Thea von Harbou’s scenario is that they use the havoc created by a single, tortured pathological soul to examine the intersection of private madness and public hysteria, encompassing a wide swath of Berlin society: the poor (Mother Beckmann is too busy slaving away at her household work to watch over little Elsie); a gallery of grotesques gathering at a men’s club—drinking, smoking, talking politics; the modern world of mass communication, especially newspapers, exploited by Beckert to terrorize Berliners; the vast criminal underworld, including beggars, thieves and prostitutes; and the official world of the police. In the course of this unflattering portrait of a city’s susceptibility to mass hysteria, the scenarists anticipate later semi-documentary and procedural American noirs, such as The Enforcer (1951). Even though the criminals capture Beckert before the police, Lang and von Harbou meticulously document the official methods of investigation which, in any event, would soon have led to his capture. Deft cross-cutting unites criminals and police in their all-out search for the killer. [4]

We first see Beckert’s face reflected in a mirror. He appears to be trying out different facial expressions. As the nonsynchronous voiceover of the handwriting analyst informs us, he is a kind of actor. Perhaps he’s trying on different masks. In a later scene he is looking into the window of a hardware shop, his face encircled by the light reflecting off a display of knives, when he sees the reflection of a little girl standing behind him. As he swoons in ecstasy at the sight of his prey, losing all normal perspective, we are in a privileged position to see what he cannot—that which is beyond all reflected images—the monster lurking beneath all the masks in an unguarded moment of madness and rapture.
​________________________________​
[4] The criminal underworld wants to catch the killer, in part, because the police’s continuous raids are bad for business. The blind beggar’s recognition of Beckert’s tuneless whistling of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” leads to his capture before the police’s clue of his favorite brand of cigarette.​
3
When Beckert is finally trapped in the cellar of an abandoned distillery factory, M contracts from the portrait of an entire city under duress to a single, confined space. It is here that Lang generously gives his actor a kind of theatrical set piece. Beckert expresses his class superiority over the lowlife criminals who have put him on trial. He calls them “lazy pigs” for not getting real jobs. But, then, having been deeply shaken by the blind beggar’s display of a balloon like the one he used to entice little Elsie Beckmann to her death, and then by the “Safecracker’s” display of photos of his other victims, he confesses to his double nature.
 
Unlike Cesare, Caligari’s unconscious killing machine, Beckert knows that he is two, not one. He is both the Kindermörder and the bourgeoisie “standing before a poster, reading what I’ve done. I read and read . . . I did that? I don’t remember a thing! Don’t I have this cursed thing inside me? This fire, this voice, this agony. . . I have to roam the streets endlessly, always sensing that someone’s following me. It’s me. I’m following myself! I can’t escape from myself!” [5]
 
Beckert is saved from the bloodlust of the criminals when an off-screen presence, a police raid led by Homicide Inspector Karl Lohmann, causes the criminals to raise their arms above their heads.
 
The outcome of Beckert’s actual trial is reduced to the ambiguous court pronouncement, “In the name of the people . . . ,” so that we don’t know for certain whether the defense or prosecution arguments, which we’ve just witnessed in the criminals’ kangaroo court, won out.
 
Nevertheless, Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda of the Nazi regime, apparently saw M as pro-death penalty, taking the side of the “prosecution” in the kangaroo court, and therefore as an attack on the kind of “sentimental humanism” that would merely confine a man like Beckert to an insane asylum. [6]  When Goebbels summoned Lang, in 1933, presumably to censor The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), which seemed to place Nazi-like slogans into the mouths of criminals, according to Lang’s account, he was told that “the Fuhrer has seen your films, and has said, ‘This is the man who will give us our National Socialist films.’” Goebbels offered Lang the “opportunity” to become the leader of the German film industry.
 
Whatever may have transpired between Goebbels and Lang, the latter left Germany within a few months after this meeting. When he arrived in the United States in 1934, it appears that the monster—perhaps as a stowaway—came with him to the New World.
_______________________
[5]  The humanization of the most wretched and despicable of human beings, a man who rapes and kills little girls, may betray Lang’s private opposition to the death penalty. The “M” marked on Beckert’s coat by one of the criminals to identify him could stand for “Mörder” (murderer); but it could also signify “Mensch,” the German word for “person” or “human being,” a double meaning that fits Lang’s dark worldview: Every human being is a potential murderer.
[6]  In a diary entry, dated 21 May 1931 (ten days after M opened), Goebbels wrote: “Fantastic. Against humanitarian sentimentality. For the death penalty. Lang will be our director one day.”
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Scarlet Street​
​A half-year after Germany had unconditionally surrendered to the Allied Powers, the creature reemerges at the end of 1945 in the most unlikely guise of Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson). Is “Chris” a man’s or a woman’s name? This ambiguous sexuality goes to the heart of his problem.
 
Chris is being honored this particular Saturday evening on the occasion of his 25th year as cashier for his boss J.J. Hogarth. His steadfast faithfulness is rewarded with an expensive gold watch. Five years before his big night he had married his landlady Adele (Rosalind Ivan), [7] apparently out of a combination of loneliness and to save rent money.
 
Chris has a hobby. Every Sunday he paints, expressing the deepest longings hidden within his timid soul, though Adele has banished Chris’s pastime to the bathroom. In addition to a secure job, a marriage and a hobby, he has a best friend, Charlie (Samuel S. Hinds), with whom he makes an early exit from the testimonial dinner in his honor.
 
Lang’s masterful prologue would seem to place Chris Cross in an entirely different world from the androgynous sociopath and loner, Hans Beckert. And yet, as Chris and Charlie escape into the bleak, rain-soaked New York streets, we see them in an oblique high-angle longshot reminiscent of a similar composition of Beckert fleeing like a rat in a maze on the streets of Berlin as the criminals close in on him. In M, however, this shot comes late in the film, after we’ve learned, often in a semi-documentary manner, who Beckert is and what he’s done. In Scarlet Street, by contrast, Lang gives us his “fate” shot early in the film, after a condensed psychological portrait of Chris at the testimonial dinner: he’s timid, superstitious, inarticulate, a creature of habit, but, all in all, a nice guy. In M, Lang does not investigate the origins of Beckert’s sociopathic personality, [8] whereas, in Scarlet Street, he gives us a sketch of the entire shape of one man’s life within a few minutes of screen time.
 
After the high-angle longshot, we see Chris and Charlie talking in medium close-up.
 
“I wonder what it’s like to be loved by a young girl like [J.J. Hogarth’s mistress]?” Chris says to his friend. [9]  “You know, nobody ever looked at me like that—not even when I was young.”
 
Chris thus wistfully reveals his longing and passivity, and then further confesses, “When I was young I dreamt I was going to be an artist. I dreamt I was going to be a great painter one day.”
 
These remarks to his best friend and his behavior at the party give a strong sense of his character. The juxtaposition of the preceding longshot with Chris’s confession in close-up conveys a kind of cinematic meaning: what fate might befall an innocent like Chris Cross if he were lured into a world far larger and more sinister than his little circumscribed life of habit, unlived dreams and resignation, and plunged into a world beyond his depth?
_______________________
[7]  “Adele” is from the Old German, adal, meaning “noble,” the only name Lang retains from Jean Renoir’s La Chienne (The Bitch) (1931), of which Scarlet Street is a faithful remake with respect to story, but very different, i.e., much darker, in tone. Given Adele’s shrewish nature, Lang would appear to be an ironist.
[8]  Beckert’s pathology may have resulted, in part, from “shell shock” from having served in the Great War. M is littered with the refuse of that traumatic event, e.g., in the abundance of beggars on the streets, including the one-legged man, Emil Dustermann, “conscripted” into the search for Beckert. Lang had originally considered using flashbacks to the Great War to connect the killing of the war years to Beckert’s serial killings. The entire film might be seen as a meditation on the devastating effect of the war, including the fact that, in the portrait of Berlin society, we are never shown a single intact family.
[9]  J.J. Hogarth’s extramarital affair immediately establishes the film’s pervasive theme of deception.
5
Chris says goodbye to Charlie, deciding to walk home alone on his big night. As he enters the nightmare noir world nothing is as it appears.
 
When he encounters Kitty March (Joan Bennett) on a street in Greenwich Village, he’s decked out in a tuxedo and the gold watch from the dinner in his honor. He pretends to be a wealthy painter, instead of a lowly cashier. She lets him think she’s an actress, instead of a prostitute. Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea) pretends to be Kitty’s roommate Milly’s (Margaret Lindsay) lover, rather than Kitty’s lover and pimp. (Kitty and Johnny will later conspire on how to extract money from their mark.) When Chris returns home after his exhilarating encounter with his femme fatale, we learn that he may, in his own way, be as stunted in his sexual maturation as Beckert. It is startling to hear him tell his “wife,” Adele, “You know, I’ve never seen a woman naked,” to which she replies, “I should hope not!”
 
Just as nothing is as it appears on the surface of this fluid and distorted dream world, Chris Cross, a man who lives as an exile within himself, like his compatriot Hans Beckert, cannot see the outside world in its true proportions. This is as true of his primitive paintings, which lack “perspective,” as in his life. His “naïve” or “primitive” paintings, seen throughout the film, depict what isn’t there: a lush bouquet for a sad, wilting flower (a gift from Kitty); a strikingly attractive woman for his homely wife; and a portrait of Katherine (Kitty) March—shallow and cheap—as regal and self-possessed. [10]
 
When Kitty fully reveals her utter contempt for Chris, his fantasy world is shattered, and his only form of satiation is the sharp point of an ice pick. He stabs her repeatedly. His fate, in the Langian economy, is much like Beckert’s—their inchoate passion can only be fully articulated through an instrument of blind rage.
 
Scarlet Street deals with the investigation and trial of Kitty March’s murder in a condensed and elliptical manner. The wrong man, Johnny Prince, is convicted and executed. [11]  In the montage trial sequence that makes the case against Johnny, Chris takes the stand and publicly disowns his paintings to save his neck: “My former wife is correct. [12]  I really can’t paint. My copies [of Kitty March’s] paintings were so bad I had to destroy them.”
_______________________ 
[10]  The twelve paintings done for the film by Lang’s friend, John Decker, were sent to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for exhibition in March 1946.
[11]  As Lang appeared to deceive Goebbels in his ambiguous disposition of the fate of Hans Beckert in M, the puritanical Hays Office did not seem to mind that the wrong man was executed in Scarlet Street, perhaps because Johnny Prince is such a despicable character and did not seem like an “innocent” victim. The Production Code, or Hays Office, was established in 1930 by the American film industry as a form of self-censorship.
[12]  In an amusing subplot, Chris is contacted by Adele’s former husband, Homer Higgins (Charles Kemper). Homer had presumably died in an attempt to save a drowning woman. His bigger than life heroic photograph has loomed over Adele’s household as a constant reminder to Chris what a real man looks like. In fact, Homer turns out to be a sleazy con man who had faked his own death. He attempts to extort money from Chris, but Chris successfully arranges for Homer and Adele to meet, effectively annulling his marriage. Even in this somewhat farcical B story, the movie’s theme of pervasive deception is underscored.
6
After the execution of Johnny Prince, Chris is in a seedy hotel room. He’s whistling his very own theme song, "My Melancholy Baby," which we’ve heard throughout the film. He is a “melancholy baby,” i.e., an utterly desolate and never-fully-formed human being, forever outside the intimate embrace of the dyad of romantic love, which he now hears as the voices of Johnny and Kitty taunting him: “Jeepers, I love you, Johnny. Oh, Johnny, he killed me, too. He’s brought us together forever” Kitty whispers. And Johnny answers, “See, Chris, she loves me.” Chris then fails in an attempt to hang himself.
 
He is responsible for both their deaths, but he is melancholy, not because he caused their deaths, but rather, because he never was and never will be loved by a woman like Kitty March. Not when he was young, not now, when he’s old. The disposition of his fate can be expressed in the exact words of Beckert, his brother in the haunted nightmare noir world: “I have to roam the streets endlessly, always sensing that someone’s following me. I’m shadowing myself! I can’t escape myself!” His very name—Chris Cross—signals that he is eternally at war with himself.
 
His final descent into the shadowlands comes after five or six unchronicled, aimless years as a vagrant. It’s the holiday season.
 
The strains of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” accompany him as he comes upon the Dellarowe Art Gallery on a cold December evening:
 O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant!
We look through Chris’s eyes at Katherine March’s “Self-Portrait” in extreme close-up and, as two men carry it out of the gallery to a waiting car, the painting recedes from Chris’s and our view to the strains of “My Melancholy Baby:”
 Come to me, my melancholy baby
   Cuddle up and don’t be blue.
       All your fears are foolish fancies…
When Mr. Dellarowe says to a wealthy matron of the arts, “Well, there goes her masterpiece,” we hear a snippet of “Jingle Bells,” Lang’s final mocking counterpoint to Chris’s journey to nowhere:
       Jingle bells, jingle bells,
         Jingle all the way.
      Oh! What fun it is to ride
       In a one-horse open sleigh.
“I really hate to part with it,” says Dellarowe.
 
“For $10,000 I shouldn’t think you’d mind,” she replies. ​
7
The painting is, at once, the symbol of the destruction of Chris’s power to earn money through his own work, his self-emasculation, virtually the annihilation of his deepest self. But it was Chris Cross himself who brought forth his own demise so he could “be loved by a young girl like [Kitty]” when he let her name stand for his work.
 
“What difference does it make whose name is on those pictures, yours or mine?” he told Kitty when he discovered she had sold his paintings as her own. “Why, it’s just like we were married. Only I’d take your name.”
 
It was at the very moment of their “marriage,” the high point of his delusional life, that Chris paints “Self-Portrait,” a portrait of himself as a woman. (Is Beckert’s identity, in a monstrous act of narcissism, similarly fused with the little girls who were his victims?)
 
At the end of the film, as we strain to pick out Chris Cross in the midst of a crowd on the dark streets of New York, Lang aids us by a dissolve that strips away everyone except Chris, left shuffling alone, a wandering derelict.
 
Mild-mannered, loyal and dutiful, Chris Cross was lured into a world beyond his depth. He would have been better off had he remained J.J. Hogarth’s loyal cashier and Adele’s long-suffering husband, exiled in the bathroom, where at least he was free to express his deepest longings and desires in private through his painting. But who could fault this Everyman for wanting something more out of his life? [13]  Who does not want to be rich, famous—and loved?
 
As Beckert was haunted by the faces of the mothers and daughters who were his victims, Chris cannot stop hearing the voices of Johnny and Kitty in their eternal round of erotic whisperings from which he is forever excluded:
Kitty: Jeepers, I want to hold you, Johnny.
Johnny: I’m here, baby. She’s mine, Chris.
Chris Cross is the monster who slayed them, but their whispering voices will haunt him forever.
​___________________________
[13] Robinson gives a performance as great in its subtle way, his face registering every passing emotion, as Lorre’s was great in its theatrical extravagance. Lang considered Scarlet Street his best American film and M his best German film. M has a legitimate claim to be considered one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema. Scarlet Street is a masterpiece of film noir, one of the most powerful and uncompromising representations of the tragic emotion of pity in the dramatic arts. But neither film would be nearly so great without the performances of Lorre and Robinson.​
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Epilogue​
​Be careful, citizens! Be careful!
 
There’s a monster among us. It is called Caligari/Cesare. It is called Hans Beckert/Kindermörder. It is called Chris Cross when it assumes the benign shape of this mild-mannered man at the crossroads of an uneventful life.
 
It changes, adapts—puts on a new mask for the old—, devolves as it grows. It is coming from the Old World to the New, a Migrating Spirit in search of new worlds and new hosts.
 
In Old Europe it assumed many names: Jack the Ripper. The Cannibal of Münsterberg. The Butcher of Rostov. The Vampire of Düsseldorf. [14]
 
It arrives stealthily upon our shores: The Boston Strangler. The Night Stalker. Son of Sam. The Zodiac Killer. The Hillside Strangler.
 
His name is Albert DeSalvo. Richard Ramirez. David Berkowitz. Jeffrey Dahmer. Her name is Aileen Wuornos. Their names are Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
 
It comes upon the moviegoers in Aurora, Colorado as the Dark Knight Rising. He is dressed in black, wearing a gas mask, a ballistic helmet, bullet-resistant leggings, tactical gloves. He’s armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, a Smith & Wesson semi-automatic rifle, and a Glock 22 .40-caliber handgun. His hair is orange.
 
And now the Migratory Spirit has assumed a most pleasing shape to lure his prey in a parking lot in the Pacific Northwest. The day is warm and bright. He feigns injury. He’s good looking, articulate, charming and charismatic, a rising star in Republican Party politics—a valued assistant to the Governor! And yet a monster is concealed beneath the ingratiating mask as he smiles helplessly into your innocent eyes. You want to help because you are decent and good. You look upon the last face you’ll see on the last day of your life.
 
Is he two, divided against himself, like Hans Beckert and Chris Cross, or one, an unadulterated malevolent force, cunning and depraved? Is this pure, heartless evil? In this guise he’s called Ted Bundy. Of himself, he says, “I’m the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.” Is this a human face? Look closer.
 
You work beside him. You’re impressed by his kindness as he talks someone “down” on a suicide hotline. You confide in him. You would trust him with your life.[15]
 
Citizens! There’s a murderer among us! Keep closer watch over your children! Watch yourselves! Beware!
 
It looks like you—or me. It’s a voice inside us.
​___________________
[14]  The character of Hans Beckert was influenced by numerous contemporary news accounts of serial killings. Perhaps the most infamous was the Vampire of Düsseldorf, aka, the Düsseldorf Monster, Peter Kürten (1883-1931). There was much debate at the time whether he should be declared legally insane. Several days into his trial, Kürten told his defense attorney that he wished to change his plea to one of guilty. Addressing the court, he said, “I have no remorse. As to whether recollection of my deeds makes me feel ashamed, I will tell you [that] thinking back to all the details is not at all unpleasant. I rather enjoy it.” On the morning of 2 July 1931, Kürten was executed on the grounds of Klingelputz Prison, Cologne.
[15]  Ann Rule, a former Seattle police officer and aspiring crime writer, worked alongside Bundy at Seattle’s Suicide Hotline Crisis Center. Rule would eventually write, The Stranger Beside Me, a major biography of Bundy. She saw nothing disturbing in Bundy’s personality at the time (1971), describing him as “kind, solicitous, and empathetic.” He was executed at the Florida State Prison on 24 January 1989, age 42. The night before his execution he confessed to 30 homicides, but the true number is believed to be much higher.​
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Don Plansky has participated in many OLLI at SF State writer workshops. In a former incarnation, he worked as a freelance journalist, contributing more than 200 articles to The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, as well as book reviews for The Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies. Don has been a member of the Vistas & Byways Editorial Board since 2015.
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​Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University​.
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