Metropolis (1927) - film review

In the twenty-first century city of Metropolis, the wealthy elite live in luxury in sprawling tower complexes whilst millions of workers toil away in subterranean vaults, constantly serving the machines which keep the city alive.  Freder, the son of one of the rich overlords, follows a beautiful young woman, Maria, to the underground world of the workers.  Here, Maria preaches to willing ears that the workers’ oppression will one day be at an end.   Deeply moved by what he has seen, Freyder returns to the tower city and confronts his father, but to no avail.  Fearing an uprising, his father, Joh Fredersen, allies himself with a ruthless inventor, Rotwang, who has just perfected a humanoid robot.  Having kidnapped Maria, they transfer her features to the robot, and then send the robot to the underground city to stir up a revolt which will turn the workers against Maria and her followers...

Although it is now widely acknowledged as one of the greatest science-fiction films ever made, a silent masterpiece and possibly the pinnacle of German expressionism, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has enjoyed something of a chequered history.  Indeed, there is no single definitive version of the film.  The original 1926 version was destroyed and the film now exists in around half a dozen various versions of differing length and quality.

Even today, with all the powerful visual effects afforded by CGI technology, Metropolis still has the ability to impress its audience with its stunning visuals.   The power of the film, and the thing which has enabled it to achieve cult status and its reputation as a masterpiece, is primarily the sheer scale and quality of its images.  The design of the city is a work of unfettered genius, and its realisation with models and full-size sets is truly awesome.  Add to that some remarkable cinematography which lends the film a feeling of scale and menace that only a few other films have come close to achieving.

The only negative criticism that can be directed at the film is its convoluted plot and overly theatrical performances – but such faults are easily overlooked (if not irrelevant) when set alongside the film’s other artistic strengths.   Metropolis also has a strong allegorical message (reflecting the Marxist sentiment of its time, but still relevant today) that workers and leaders (the hand and the head) must work together to create a better world.

In its day, Metropolis was the most expensive film ever to have been made, costing around seven million German marks, coming very close to bankrupting its production company, UFA.  This level of extravagance is evident throughout the film, which employed around thirty thousand extras and pushed film-making technology to its limits.  This can be seen in the film’s great set-pieces, which include the legendary laboratory scene (where Maria’s form is merged with that of the robot, the prototype for every mad-scientist scene ever since) and the flood and riot scenes at the end of the film.

Fritz Lang was inspired to make the film after a visit to New York in 1924, where sights of the towering skyscrapers left a lasting impression on him.  He wrote the script with his new wife Thea von Harbou, based on her novel of the same title.   Brigitte Helm, who stars in the film in the double role of Maria and the android replica, subsequently became a huge star in Germany.

When the film was first released in Germany and the United States, it received a mixed criticism and proved to be a commercial failure.  The American version was cut to 63 minutes, making the plot virtually unintelligible, whilst the 1928 German cut version, running to 90 minutes, was for many years the definitive version.  The film has since been re-edited and re-released a number of times, most controversially in by Giorgio Moroder in 1984 (with colour tinting and a modern synthesiser soundtrack).

The most complete restoration to date came in 2001, with missing scenes restored in the correct sequence and with the addition of captions to fill in the remaining missing material.  The various versions of the film are quite different and it really a matter of personal taste as to which is considered the best version.  There is, however, no question that Metropolis is a work of huge artistic merit and one of the great triumphs of twentieth century cinema.

One man who was singularly unimpressed by Metropolis was the world renowned English writer, H.G. Wells.  The author of The Time Machine and The Invisible Man was so offended by the film’s apparent failings that he wrote a harsh critique for a newspaper after he saw the film at a public screening in 1927.  The article was later included in his 1928 book "The Way The World is Going", in which Wells also considered, amongst other matters, the dangers posed by aeroplanes, the right of Europeans to criticise Americans, and the likelihood of war between Britain and the United States.

Wells’ objections to Metropolis are concerned primarily with the scientific rather than the artistic content of the film.  He didn’t seem to appreciate that the film was intended as a fantasy, an interpretation of the world as it was then, not an informed  speculative documentary about technology and social organisation one hundred years hence.  How ironic that the man who is credited with the invention of science fiction had so little sympathy with the genre that he has so greatly influenced.

In his article about Metropolis , Wells doesn’t mince his words.  "I have recently seen the silliest film.  I do not believe it is possible to make one sillier.  It gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and muddlement about mechanical progress in general, served up with a sauce of sentimentality that is all its own...."

Having pretty well accused Lang of plagiarising his own novel, "The Sleeper Awakes", Wells lambastes the film for making no serious attempt to extrapolate into the future, even going so far as to say that Lang should have consulted real scientists before making the film.  With his characteristic wit, he then mocks the fanciful process by which the robot is brought to life – "the crowning imbecility of the film".   Wells concludes: "The pity of it is that this unimaginative, incoherent, sentimentalising, and make-believe film, wastes some very fine possibilities...  I am dismayed by the intellectual laziness it displays."  Ah well, you can’t please them all....

© James Travers 2002

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