[One can see] that Lang's career in the classic German cinema, embracing as it did most of its tendencies, serves in itself as a kind of allegory. In a variety of stylistic disguises the same obsessions appear and recur—in the Nibelungen saga, which added to expressionism an architectural solidity and massive fresco-like sweep, fatality of legend; in the contemporary melodramas, The Spiders, the two Mabuse films, The Spy, fatality of power and violence; in M, fatality of the sadistic inner self; in the early scripts for Joe May and Otto Rippert (Plague in Florence, Woman with the Orchid) and in The Half-Caste and The Master of Love, fatality of sexual domination; in Metropolis, fatality of the machine future. Lang had studied painting and architecture before coming to the cinema, and it is in his legendary and spectacle films, naturally, that a sensuous plastic quality is uppermost, but the images in his melodramas were no less assiduously composed. As in Siegfried he discovered the expressiveness of architectural form, so in The Spy and Doctor Mabuse he discovered the expressiveness of light and, of course, darkness. In these films he effectively created a language of screen melodrama as well as many of its myths. (pp. 16-17)
Behind the two Mabuse films, The Spiders and The Spy is the … idea of demonic, almost abstract, power-organisation determined purposelessly to overthrow human society by acts of outrage and violence…. Finally, in M, the horrific life-and-death struggle is embodied in a single character, the child-murderer wretchedly trying to escape from his impulses and hallucinations.
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