Thank God Fritz Lang's Excellent The Big Heat Managed To Somehow Get Past Hayes Code Censors

Film noirs were one of the rare relatively high-profile Hollywood genres that could get away with a certain amount of moral ambiguity in the Hayes Code era of filmmaking, though even a number of film noirs had to concede to Hayes Code restrictions in the name of "protecting the sanctity of the family". Watching The Big Heat, it's a wonder this film made it past the Hayes Code censors, especially since The Big Heat takes a gigantic agitated sledgehammer to the institutions of law & order that the Hayes Code was so keen on upholding. The Big Heat is an utter nightmare for anyone devoted to what the Hayes Code stood for but it's a dream come true for everybody else just looking for some good cinema to enjoy.

Fritz Lang's M Harrowingly Shows A Society In Chaos In The Face of Daunting Tragedy

Some movies are declared to be character studies, but Fritz Lang's 1931 feature M strikes me more as a larger-scale societal study. Though individual characters are found throughout the story, M is more concerned with examining how individual large pockets of society react to the prospect of terror occuring in their midst rather than just focusing on how one person reacts to such horrifying circumstances. Specifically, those horrifying circumstances are that someone in the city of Berlin, Germany is kidnapping and killing children. This is a tragedy that sends all of the residents of Berlin, Germany into a frenzy as they try to figure out who exactly could be behind such vicious slayings, with the police officers and the criminal syndicates of this town each having their own agendas in wanting to bring this killer to justice.