Title: Metropolis
Rating: 5 Stars
Continuing through the list of BFI all time great films, I watched Metropolis next. This is one of two Fritz Lang films in the list. The other, M, is ranked even higher. I watched M several years ago and loved it (click here to read that review). Not only do those two films appear in the BFI list, but he also plays himself in a different BFI film, the French New Wave film Contempt (reviewed here). It's pretty amazing to consider that Lang makes appearances on the all time best film list for directing a silent film, directing a sound film, and for acting in a third.
It's not surprising that Metropolis is on the list. It's considered one of the all time great silent films, on par with such films as Battleship Potemkin, Modern Times, and Intolerance. It has an interesting history of having major chunks of it being lost to posterity and then, over ensuing decades, pieces of it being discovered in out of the way places, including of all places, Argentina. Through painstaking work, it seems that a pretty fully restored version of the film is now available.
There's no shortage of plot. It opens with an army of workers, all clothed identically and only identifiable by the number on their caps, endlessly working their dead end jobs until near physical exhaustion. All they do is work mindlessly until the work whistle blows, at which point they trudge off slowly to their underground homes, just to do it all over again the next day.
Aboveground, people dressed in white frolic in gardens, play sports, and are waited upon hand and foot. Most privileged of all is Freder, the son of the city master, Joh Fredersen. All is well, good, and frivolous until Maria, with a bunch of underground urchins, takes the elevator up to show them the garden of the rich. They are quickly shooed away but Freder is fascinated by Maria.
Freder decides to go underground to check it out. When he sneaks down, he witnesses a violent explosion that kills many workers. Shocked, he runs to his father to tell him, convinced that his father will take action. Instead, he seems to barely care.
Freder decides he must help the workers. He goes undercover as a worker and becomes mesmerized when he hears Maria preach to the workers about how the underground people and the aboveground people need to work together for the betterment of all. She beseeches for a mediator to make that happen. Freder decides that he can be that mediator.
Meanwhile, his father is determined to immediately nip this unrest. Knowing that Maria is the key, he visits the local mad scientist inventor (everyone has one of those, right?) Rotwang. Rotwang just incidentally happens to be creating a robot that can mimic any human. Fredersen orders Rotwang to make a robot copy of Maria. Rotwang kidnaps Maria and successfully replicates her.
The robot Maria is just a bit zany. She's really popular with the aboveground people because she does a mean burlesque. However, Rotwang has a secret plot to destroy society. He orders her to go to the belowground people and to preach violent revolution. She whips the people into a frenzy and they violently destroy the machines, causing massive flooding. The only problem is that apparently the belowground people have forgotten that they've left their children behind in the underground (doh!).
Luckily, Freder and the real Maria heroically manage to save the children's lives. The robot Maria is tied to a stake and burned. Freder, standing between the belowground foreman and his father, convinces the two to shake hands. Indeed he becomes the mediator. As the title card says, for the head and hand to work together, they need the heart.
First of all, the special effects are amazing. Considering that the year is 1927 and we're probably more than fifty years away from CGI, it's fascinating to watch. Lang does all kinds of tricks to get the effects that he wants, including doing crazy things like re-running a film through the camera like thirty times or so. Considering the practical limits that he was operating under, the film is breathtaking.
This magic was not cheap. Keep in mind that this film was made in 1924 in the German Weimar Republic. You know, the Weimar Republic that was crushed under Versailles Peace Treaty debt and was occasionally experiencing periods of massive hyperinflation. The film nearly bankrupted the studio. It cost five million dollars to make. That's about two hundred million in today's money. Again, this was during the time of the Weimar Republic.
Philosophically, there is much going on here. Clearly, there is the class struggle between the belowground workers (the proletariat) and the aboveground workers (the capitalist class). You see workers literally working themselves to collapse and, in a hallucination, being fed to the maw of a machine turned monster. Joh Fredersen cares nothing about the workers and only focuses upon productivity and profit. Considering the time and place of the film, this was an urgent theme.
With Maria, you see the messianic calling of workers to throw off their chains. With the robot Maria, you see the dangers of the populist false prophet as she uses the mob's energy to sow destruction.
There's the conflict between unbridled technology and humanity. Rotwang is every tech bro that invents something really cool just because he can without ever thinking about whether or not he should.
Watching the film now, you see how it inspired so many films to come. Rotwang's lab has to be the prototype for every mad scientist lab to come in cinema over the next one hundred years. You can see that Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers overtly patterned Dr Strangelove after Rotwang.
Lang even predicts the future. There's a scene where Joh Federsen calls up his underground foreman (named Grot) on a video screen. Yes, in 1924, this was the first Zoom call!
The film would have been perfect if, during the Zoom call, Federsen had told Grot that they needed to circle back or maybe take that issue to the parking lot.
Other than that, it's a pretty perfect film.
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