Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart, says Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, so if we learn nothing else from this film, it’s simply do not let Fritz Lang set up any arbitration tribunals. His 1927 film is now commonly held up as a masterpiece of the silent age, although was rather less warmly received on initial release. And, I suppose we should recognise before getting to far into deciding which viewpoint is correct, we’re not judging the complete work, at least as Lang intended, the film being cut substantially after the initial premier with parts of that still lost to time, even with valiant restoration processes from the odd long buried reel that show up from time to time.
Anyway, looking at what’s available to us, we’re introduced to Gustav Fröhlich as Freder, the indeterminately aged but “young” son of Alfred Abel’s Joh Fredersen, the apparent creator and ruler of a vast Metropolis boom title drop. Here the wealthy live in carefree luxury, with the 0.1%, such as Freder, living an apparently entirely insulated cosseted life in the Eden-esque pleasure gardens while hordes of nameless workers toil and die at the underground edifice of the pitiless machines that run the place. Pitiless and puzzling in function and design, it must be said, but I suppose that’s the expressionism speaking.
He’s shaken back to reality by the sudden intrusion into Paradise by a bunch of child poors, shepherded by Brigitte Helm’s Maria, a saintly figure we’ll later find to be held as a prophet of sorts by the oppressed working classes. They are quickly banished back to the under-depths alongside the rest of her kind, but not before Freder has fallen in love with her, and perhaps also her message that they are all brothers. Even the girls. Maybe that’s also the expressionism speaking.
Freder resolves to ask his father about what the deal is with all this mass oppression and all, and before long is heading off there himself to find Maria and fully see the horrors of the underground underclass, shadowed by his father’s spy, Fritz Rasp’s The Thin Man. Seeing that things could be coming off the rails, Papa Frederson enlists the help of his long term frenemy and inventor, Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang. He has been working on a secret project, the iconic man-machine, as the intertitles would have it, although I see Rotwang’s given him tits. Expressionism, probably.
This machine can take the form of anyone, so Frederson wants to create a robotic doppelganger of Maria with the intent of ruining her reputation and dampening down talk of working class revolution, but turns out Rotwang is holding on to more of a grudge than he lets on, and seeks instead to tear it all down and watch the world burn. Young Freder therefore finds himself slap bang in the middle of these machinations and must find a way to save Maria, and the city, from destruction.
Now, there’s been a lot of analysis done over the years on Metropolis, and if you are the sort of person who gets off on that sort of thing, more power to you. Myself, I think I’m on Team H.G. Welles, who I’m led to believe knows a thing or two about science fiction, in thinking that this is silly. Perhaps the crucial moments of meaning are those that have been lost, but I cannot find a particularly coherent message in Metropolis that’s evident in the text in front of me. For example, I’m surprised to see here that it was criticised for having a communist message, and let me just run this through my Marx-alyser…. results coming in now… Ah, it just says “This ain’t it, chief”.
Likewise, in common with a few of these films, actually, there’s a feint at a more religious message in there, except it kind of doesn’t really say anything much about that, other than that religion exists in this context. Which kind of seems like a preemtive attempt to avoid being cancelled by zealots, Copernicus style, rather than having a point as such. Although Cancelled by Zealots is a good name for an indie album.
So, to cut my witterings short, I am not on board with this as a masterpiece of messaging, but there’s more than enough to appreciate in the other aspects of the film. In particular, the imagination and execution of the worldbuilding and the visuals is really rather impressive, now, let alone for the time, and is more than worth the price of admission by itself. The performances, well, there’s always a fair amount of playing to the back seats with this era, so I ‘ll go along with it, even when it’s unarguably gone into waaaaay too silly territory (Evil Maria and the dance club seduction scene, I am looking directly at you).
At least, unlike some other landmark films we’ve covered that make me feel like I’m on crazy pills because they’re obviously awful, there’s at least a lot in here that I can see why people would latch on to and want to talk about, even if I disagree that the messaging or the metaphors are clear enough to support it, alongside stuff that I did appreciate. So I’m glad I’ve watched it and certainly recommend anyone with a passing interest in the history of cinema, not just science fiction should watch. But I’ll probably never come back to this. And maybe that’s the most expressionist thing of all. It’s not, that makes no sense, I just didn’t have a good way to wrap this review up. And I still don’t.