STATE AND MAIN m Cert 15, 102 mins DAVID Mamet, than whom no other playwright has a hotter tongue for street talk, a keener eye for a human weakness or a sharper knife for slaughtering sacred cows, may be going soft at...

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In the following essay, Chang discusses the role that Schranker plays in the narrative of Lang's M, and questions the character's purpose in the film.

["M"] is based on the crimes and the final apprehension by the police of the famous child murderer of Düsseldorf. Certainly no subject could be more inherently horrible, more dangerously open to a facile sensationalism of treatment. Yet such are the tact and the genius with which Fritz Lang has handled it that the result is something at once more significant than either the horror story, pure and simple …, or the so-called psychological "document" of the type which ...

Fritz Lang seems to be constantly settling his accounts with society. His main characters are always outsiders, marginal people. The hero of M was portrayed as a victim. In 1933, Lang had to get out of Germany quickly in the face of Nazism. From then on, all of his work, even the Westerns and the thrillers, will reflect this violent break and very soon afterward we see the theme of revenge grafted on to the experiences of persecution. Several of Lang's Hollywood films are painted on this canvas: a ma...