Film Review - Metropolis Film Review

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House review of Metropolis (1926)

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is considered to this day to be one of the first masterpieces of science fiction. In terms of science fiction, it is both the natural cinematic culmination of the works of early writers such as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and the beginning of a new era of film that would culminate in the sci-fi/horror films of the 1950’s.

The Metropolis in question is a futuristic city in which the elite live above ground, benefiting from the labor of the slave class, who live and work underground, providing the labor that makes the Metropolis run. In charge of this whole system is wealthy businessman John Frederson (Alfred Abel), who is philosophical about the occasional gruesome deaths of the workers below. The hero of the film is Frederson’s son, Freder—a reversal of names that hints at the fact that it will be the son who leads the father in the end.

Young Freder (Gustave Frohlich) is busy enjoying his life as a young man of privilege when he encounters a beautiful young woman surrounded by clearly impoverished children. He asks who the children are (instead of asking how she got in there), and she says, “These are your brothers.”

Several things happen from then on. The young woman (Brigitte Helm) turns out to be a prophetic figure, a leader exhorting the workers to dream of a better life but not to use violence to obtain it. She exhorts them to wait for a Mediator who will speak for them to the upper classes. Freder falls in love with the young woman, whose name we learn is Maria, and begins to fight his father for their rights, allying himself with them instead of with the wealthy class of his birth. Determined not to give in, Frederson works with the inventor Rotwang, who has invented a robot that can take on the appearance of any human being. Frederson tells him to make it look like Maria, so that robot-Maria can incite the workers to rebellion and Frederson will have an excuse to kill them and replace them with Rotwang’s robots.

The conflict involving the son having his eyes opened and rejecting his father’s values and actions is quite compelling, but the robot subplot ruins it. I suspect that we had to have an anti-Maria so that there could be scenes involving Brigitte Helm with few clothes on (this is before the Hayes Commission began to regulate the content of films, and I don’t think those were pasties she was wearing during the nightclub scene). I also think the robot was a symbol of the threat of science and the danger it imposes on the world, including the theft of our individual identities.

I had a hard time finding a theme to hang the convoluted plot on. At first I was convinced that Fritz Lang must be a Communist, as so many early European film makers were. The slow drudgery of the proletariat’s life, the luxury of the bourgeoisie, and the sacrifice of people to uphold a lifestyle they themselves could never attain all seemed to support that. But then the Maria figure came in, clearly either a Holy Spirit or Virgin Mary figure…perhaps even a John the Baptist, because Freder is obviously the Mediator. And Maria exhorts the workers not to be violent, not to take the means of production back into their own control. Coming a mere 8 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, that surprised me. Then I thought perhaps that the paradigm was that of Pharaoh and the Hebrew slaves—there was even a flood, but by that time, the slaves were the aggressors, and their aggression ostensibly caused their own children to die, which makes them much more like the Egyptians dead on the seashore than like the Hebrews going into the promised land.

And through it all, there’s this robot girl, who doesn’t belong anywhere. So, I don’t know what point Lang was trying to make, except perhaps that the future looks bleak for everyone. In 1925, he had no way of knowing just how bleak it would get.

More than 80 years later, it’s not easy to watch a silent film, no matter how great it is. Strangely, it’s not the silence that’s difficult. As the viewers start to get involved in the plot, the story tells itself, sometimes despite the dialogue cards that occasionally interrupt the scene.

No, the hard part is watching elements that are stylistic choices common to the time period, but feel irritating and artificial to a modern viewer. One of these is the characters’ makeup, both men and women—white skin with eyes shaded in thick black eye-shadow and eye-liner, and in some cases, lips outlined in what looks like black lipstick. Faces start to look like nothing but eyes and lips. And then there is the acting style. Stage acting did not translate naturally to film, and the exaggerated facial expressions and gestures make it hard to make an emotional connection to the characters. They serve not to elucidate but to distance.

I would recommend this film to someone for its historical and sociological value, but as far as really good stories are concerned, there might be better choices. It is interesting, though, to look at Lang’s vision of the future and figure out what he got right.