1927
DIRECTOR: FRITZ LANG PRODUCER: ERICH POMMER SCREENPLAY: THEA VON HARBOU, FROM HER NOVEL STARRING: ALFRED ABEL (JOH FREDERSEN), GUSTAV FRÖHLICH (FREDER), BRIGITTE HELM (MARIA), RUDOLF KLEIN-ROGGE (C. A. ROTWANG), FRITZ RASP (THE THIN MAN), THEODOR LOOS (JOSAPHAT), ERWIN BISWANGER (11811), HEINRICH GEORGE (GROT)
Metropolis
UFA/PARUFAMET (GERMANY) • BLACK & WHITE, 148 MINUTES (2010 RESTORATION)
The son of an oppressive future society’s ruler joins a working-class revolt incited by a mad scientist’s seductive robot.
Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis is more than a landmark silent movie. It is cinema’s first science-fiction epic. Though a financial failure on its initial release, the film’s innovative special effects and awe-inspiring imagery impacted popular culture like an earthquake. Nearly a century later, aftershocks can still be felt. An ambitious spectacle contrasting an opulent city of tomorrow with its dark underbelly of enslaved factory workers, Metropolis has echoed through the decades across the pantheon of sci-fi, from Just Imagine (1930) to Blade Runner 2049 (2017).
Lang, an Austrian filmmaker schooled in the shadowy style of German Expressionism, found the inspiration for Metropolis on his first voyage to the United States in 1924. Struck by the view of the Manhattan skyline from the harbor, Lang immediately envisioned a futuristic film. “I saw the buildings, like a vertical curtain, opalescent and very light, filling the back of the stage, hanging from a sinister sky in order to dazzle, to diffuse, to hypnotize,” he remembered. Lang’s wife, writer Thea von Harbou, penned a novel based on this vision—a melodramatic mélange of social commentary, romance, Gothic horror, biblical themes, ancient sorcery, and space-age technology originally titled Metropolis: Fate of a Human Race in the Year 2000. Von Harbou scripted the adaptation and collaborated with Lang on the production, even discovering actor Gustav Fröhlich among the extras and casting him in the lead role of Freder.
The pampered son of Metropolis’s ruler Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), Freder spends his days cavorting in sun-drenched gardens until he meets working-class beauty Maria, played by nineteen-year-old Brigitte Helm in her first acting role. Maria opens Freder’s eyes to the plight of the masses who toil day and night, operating the Moloch Machine that keeps the city running yet produces nothing. The film’s theme, which Lang summarized as “the enormous progress of technology in future times,” is brought vividly to life in its sets: colossal skyscrapers, vast highways, and ultra-modern interiors outfitted with video-phones and cutting-edge gadgetry.
The Moloch Machine
Shot over a grueling two-year period and populated with 26,000 male extras, 11,000 females, and 750 children, the production was the biggest (and most expensive) ever mounted in Germany. In its extravagance, Metropolis harkens back to grand-scale silent epics such as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), but with two new additions: science fiction and special effects. Lang and von Harbou established the modern mad-scientist archetype with the wild-eyed Rotwang (played by von Harbou’s ex-husband, Rudolf Klein-Rogge), whose shock of white hair and mechanized hand would inspire a range of cinematic spin-offs from the title character in Dr. Strangelove (1964) to Doc Brown in Back to the Future (1985). Rotwang’s often-emulated laboratory—bubbling and buzzing with electrical equipment—is used to create a lifelike robot in the image of Maria. Alluring and dangerous, the Maria-android would become a science-fiction icon, her distinctive metal inner-structure informing the look of cinematic descendants C-3PO and RoboCop. The film’s ingenious optical tricks were achieved by stop-motion, superimposition, and a technique called the “Schüfftan process,” in which mirrors were used to combine models with live action.
Critics were awestruck by the effects, but less impressed by what one Berlin reviewer described as “an absurd plot bursting at the seams with themes and motifs.” Even Lang was not especially fond of Metropolis, later dismissing it as “silly and stupid.” But the public was enraptured. The prescient allegory of a future in which technology reigns supreme and human beings are irrelevant still haunts us; the mesmerizing visuals have embedded themselves firmly in our culture. There simply never had been—and probably never will be—anything else quite like it.
Shortly after its premiere, German distributor Ufa withdrew the film and began making cuts. For the American release, Paramount hired playwright Channing Pollock to pare the story down even further. For seventy-five years, the epic was incomplete—lacking over an hour of footage believed to be lost—until discoveries in 2002 and 2008 finally resulted in a near-complete restoration of Lang’s original vision. The final twist in the saga may be the revelation that the more missing scenes are found, the less the film resembles pure science fiction. As Star Wars (1977) would fifty years later, Metropolis uses sci-fi as a means to explore philosophy, theology, and age-old conflicts between good and evil. The hodgepodge of themes and genres—exactly what the critics didn’t like in 1927—is what keeps the film fresh and full of surprises today.
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MIND-BLOWING MOMENT
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