Guest Review: Metropolis (1927)

By Philip Schweier

This is it, kids. The grandfather of all science fiction films. It may not have been the very first, but its influence is so overwhelming it can’t be avoided. Upon its release, it is reported to have cost 5 million marks, which translates to approximately $200 million in today’s dollars. The film’s run time is 153 minutes, lengthy for even modern movies. But as a silent, it was beyond epic. Most feature films of the day were an hour at the most.

It is the story of a futuristic city, split between the haves, who enjoy a life of leisure, and the have-nots, who toil away in the depths for hours on end and keep the city functioning. One day, a young woman, Maria (Brigitte Helm), brings a group of children to one of the pleasure gardens. “These are your brothers,” she tells them. The group is chased away by the authorities, but one young man, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), is intrigued.

Freder is the son of Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), the architect of Metropolis, by whose design the privileged enjoy a life of luxury at the expense of those less fortunate. Freder follows Maria don into the depths of the under-city, where he witnesses first-hand the hardship and suffering of the people who make his pampered life possible. Idealistically, he approaches his father in an effort to win them some reprieve.

Fredersen is indifferent to his son’s pleas, and Freder goes so far as to return to the workers and take the place of one who collapses at his station. He sends Worker #11811 (Erwin Biswanger) to his apartment, but Slim, Joh Fredersen’s lackey, has been keeping an eye on Freder, and quickly learns of the young man’s interference. Freder later follows his fellow workers to the underground cathedral, where Maria preaches of the day when a mediator will bring the two social factions together in harmony.

Fredersen, meanwhile, pays a visit to the home of Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), a crazed inventor. The two were once rivals for the same woman. She chose Fredersen but died in childbirth. Rotwang shows Fredersen his automaton, and the master of Metropolis schemes to have the mechanical creature take the place of the revolutionary Maria.

Rotwang follows through on Fredersen’s plan, kidnapping Maria and turning his robot into her duplicate. But the mechanical version owes more to the whore of Babylon than her altruistic namesake. Men fight duels, commit suicide, and generally go off their collective rockers in an effort to win her for themselves. The robot Maria is also tasked with stoking the fires of evolution. She encourages the workers to rebel, and effectively starve the machines, and by extension, the upper world.

Eventually, the two factions clash, but in so doing the deception is revealed. Freder challenges Rotwang in a fight atop the cathedral, and becomes the Mediator – i.e., messiah – the workers have been waiting for.

To say the film has overtones of Biblical proportions is putting it mildly. Director Fritz Lang was Jewish, though Hitler was so enamored of the film he chose to overlook the filmmaker’s Semitism. Legend has it Lang left for Paris immediately.

The film immediately began to influence those that followed, and its impact continues to ripple down through the decades. The story has become old hat by modern standards, and its age makes it easy to judge the movie as being overly long and boring. A silent film more than two and a half hours in length is a lot to foist on a modern audience. I had to watch the movie in fragments in order to maintain interest.

This particular version (on Netflix) was cobbled together from various sources, as long lost prints and negatives had been discovered in various locations over the past decade or so. Previously, audiences could only see about 60 percent of the original footage, though I can’t say very much was missing from the overall narrative.

It’s an important piece of movie history, one I recommend all film enthusiasts see, but personally I found it challenging to sit through. Though not as much as the horrible Giorgio Moroder cut of the 1980s.