M. There used to be a critic for the New York Herald Tribune who was fired for calling almost every other picture he reviewed either "great" or "one of the most important documents of our time" or something like that. You can get into trouble that way. But even if there were a levied quota of movies which one could froth happily at the mouth about (punishment for exceeding quota: a month at Judith Crist's movie camp with continuous showings of At Long Last Love) M. would be a picture to stand by. Fritz Lang's direction turns the cinema into images which fuse with one's own societal paranoia. There are a whole list of things which you may never do again after seeing M and a few of them are: whistle the Peer Gynt Suite, allow a kid to walk to school without an armed guard, see a floating balloon and not wonder where its owner is. If you only think of Peter Lorre as the whining, pop-eyed comic figure of a million parodies, try this on for size, for his performance in M is brilliant in its fullness, empathy and inseparability from the society he moves in. Hardly ever has a movie used sight and sound to better and more concentrated advantage. On a scale of one to five, this gets ninety-six and a half stars.

Monkey Business. It's gotten so that I don't like to watch the Marx Brothers M-G-M extravaganzas anymore, with their water-ballets and cupie-doll tenor heroes thrown in among the more or less emasculated brothers. So Monkey Business from the tacky Paramount days comes as blessed relief, reaffirmation and so on. It is wonderful. This is the one where Groucho, Chico and most importantly Harpo all do imitations of Maurice Chevalier singing "Eef a Nightengale Cood Sin Lak You" and where Grouch announces that "love goes out the door when money comes innuendo". The script was by S.J. Pereiman and it doesn't really matter who directed since it is hardly a film anyway Pereiman apparently won't talk about his Mark experiences anymore--he's quite right. His great work has been over shadowed by the voracious energy of cultists who locate him mainly as a servant of the brothers. But his script here is so witty and sharp that it has a character quite discernible from Kaufman's, Ruby's or certainly from the later works. Almost no one has written more distinctive comedy than he--his Nobel Prize has been a priority long ignored.