Fritz Lang

"M" (1931) is widely cited as the first major film to center on a serial killer, portraying Peter Lorre as the child murderer Hans Beckert in Weimar-era Berlin. Lang drew on real contemporary cases of child murderers for the story, and the film pioneered the use of a leitmotif—Beckert's whistling of Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King"—to identify the killer.

Lang, who had a Jewish mother who had converted to Christianity, left Germany in 1933 shortly after the Nazi rise to power. According to Lang's own frequently recounted story, Joseph Goebbels offered him a position to head the German film industry, and Lang departed for Paris that same evening, though some historians have questioned details of his account.

"Metropolis" (1927) was the most expensive film produced up to that time, costing approximately five million Reichsmarks, a sum that nearly bankrupted the studio UFA. The massive production required tens of thousands of extras and took over a year to shoot.

Yes, "M" (1931) was Lang's first talking picture, and he used the new technology with extraordinary sophistication. Rather than filling the film with dialogue, he used sound selectively and startlingly—most famously the killer's whistling and the haunting chorus of children singing about the "man in black."