Word: kuerten
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Brilliant, morbid and exciting, M is based on the Düsseldorf child murders of 1929 (the perpetrator of which, Butcher Kuerten, was executed). It was written, like most of Director Lang's productions, by his wife. Thea von Harbou. It is all in German, with fairly adequate English subtitles superimposed. Peter Lorre distinguishes himself in a magnificent cast by his haunting performance as the murderer. Good shot: the pudgy young man after seeing himself described as a maniac, peering into a mirror and stretching his mouth to see if he looks crazy...
...evening three Lutheran pastors in white ties and black frock coats arrived. They were taken to the cell of Germany's most dangerous criminal, mild-mannered, flutter-fingered Peter Kuerten, "the Diisseldorf Fiend" (TIME...
...Killer Kuerten was sentenced to death nine times for a fiendish series of bloodlust killings. Dusseldorf children, who had been going to school in vans guarded by armed policemen, played in the streets again. Peter Kuerten confessed all his crimes, muttered that when his head throbbed he just had to kill...
...shed in the prison yard were opened. Executioner Groepler wheeled out what he had been hammering and filing on all day, a dusty French guillotine, 130 years old, which, with the Code Napoleon was a present from the Emperor to the Rhine states. At 6 a.m. Killer Kuerten walked unmoved to the machine, stretched out his naked neck. Down crashed the knife...
Germans are executed with axe and chopping block by a brawny man bedight in evening clothes and black gloves. Seemingly Peter Kuerten's neck cannot escape the axe. But the Düsseldorf Court, unwilling to take the smallest chance of the nine death sentences being set aside by pardon or reprieve, wound up by sentencing the prisoner to toil 15 years at hard labor if not executed, deprived him of all his rights as a German citizen, ordered him to pay all the costs of his trial?one of the most expensive in German criminal history...