"With his little chopper, he will chop you up..." I am not ashamed to admit that after first seeing Fritz Lang's 1931 chiller, I had nightmares about a child's balloon caught amid telephone wires – one of the most understatedly distressing images of prewar cinema. From the disappearance of Elsie Beckmann to the anguished pleading of Peter Lorre's tormented killer ("I can't help what I do! I can't help it!"), Lang's razor-sharp dissection of crime and punishment never puts a foot wrong. Lorre (who died 50 years ago) is magnificent in his first major screen role, and Fritz Arno Wagner's stark cinematography is handsomely restored to crisply unsettling effect.