On demand: "M"

Overshadowed by Fritz Lang's pre-WW2 original - a film that really knew how to cast a shadow - Joseph Losey's post-War American translation of M remains taut and pointed, guided as much by its maker's dissident tendencies as by anything in the source. Losey's most subversive idea was to haul his child killer (David Wayne, winner of 1951's Bob Odenkirk Lookalike Prize) out of Lang's swampy underworld and have him run amok in an L.A. barely protected by its flimsy veneer of respectability: the business attire Wayne wears as he approaches kids in the street, the dozy and ineffective or overreaching and authoritarian lawmen on his trail, the TV spots stoking paranoia and fear, the mobs dobbing in or duffing up the innocent and guilty alike. The material is thereby connected to emergent A- and B-picture trends (you could run this M back-to-back with 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and hardly notice the join), but also the United States at the moment of Joe McCarthy. This wasn't, in Losey's eyes, an Over There problem, or an issue confined to the past, something GI Joe had seen off in the years between Ms; rather, it was an ongoing and highly immediate concern, happening right here, in Tinseltown's very backyard.

What ensues suggests Hitchcock with the leavening humour supplanted by bright, sundappled horror. Scenes of skipping moppets being pursued down Main Street by creepy men (of whom Wayne's anti-hero is only the most prominent) retain a real chill; direct sunlight gives the actual transgressions a far harsher edge. No less unnerving is the wider vision of so-called civilisation unravelling into lawlessness and barbarity. The somewhat stock casting (no big names, but tremendous faces) adds to our sense of a society of equals turning against one another and ripping itself apart. Sure, the ending's plain blunt, spitting us out onto the sidewalk, and it can't quite match Lang's overall visual flair. Yet Lang never had the Bradbury Building to play with - that 3D Escher sketch, laying bare the inner workings of capitalism, indistinguishable from those of a prison - and Losey and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo make equally suggestive, vertiginous use of the slopes of a funicular and a parking garage: however high up these characters scrabble, it's all downhill from where we're looking. Certainly far from what one might dismiss as a complacent remake, it takes nothing for granted, least of all liberal American values.

M is now streaming via rarefilmm.com and YouTube.