Movie: 'Metropolis' (1927)

This is a difficult one. 'Metropolis' is a legendary movie, and one which for most of the last eighty-nine years had thirty minutes lost from its total of one hundred and fifty, and is only now mostly restored from a damaged print found in South America. Watched in its proper historical context, it is an amazing achievement, and a grand epic that is the peak of Fritz Lang's silent movie career, even if it does take a while to get going. It's much better that 'Dr Mabuse, the Gambler', Lang's other epic (indulgently and ridiculously epic, in fact) of the time, and has some magnificent model work and production values. Watched out of context, the modern viewer might get bored, but you shouldn't watch old movies if you can't get into the setting.

I'm being serious. Get into context! You can't watch this, or 'Dr Mabuse', if you can't get yourself into an era where everything you see is being done for the first time. Everything. There may not have even been a dystopian future story before this one. There was 'The Lost World', though, the great dinosaur epic of 1925. Would that have made it to Fritz Lang's Germany of the 1920s?

Should this be a review or a critique? Or both? The story is comparatively simple. In a futuristic city, a metropolis, the decadent rich are living freely and luxuriously in the outer world, while the downtrodden workers are living underground in the Workers' City. The son of the city's genius architect falls in love with the workers' prophet or seer, and becomes aware of the horrors of the underworld existence, but his mission to reconcile the brain and the brawn of the city is complicated by a mad inventor and his brilliant robotic woman, in collusion with the architect. Got it? Can you answer questions posed at speed?

That robotic woman is the image forever associated with the film, but she actually doesn't feature very heavily in that form, but rather in her disguised form as the seer's evil double. The image wins out, though, and has done for almost ninety years. Even if the rest of the movie were terrible, then that imagery and the crazed performances of Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Dr Mabuse himself!) as Rotwang the lunatic inventor, and Brigitte Helm as the seer and robotic double, would make it a worthwhile watch. The only significant problem with the movie is structural: Each act is patterned after a piece of music, escalating in action and energy with each change, leaving the beginning of the film a little flat. However, as a counterbalance, the finale is frenetic!

'Metropolis' was definitely worth seeing. It was scary in prospect, but much better once it was de-mystified and simply a movie on the television. Are there any more silent era classics to check out? Only time will tell. Now, if only you could believe that that architect was worth saving and reuniting with the workers. He was rather a cad and a fiend...

O.