= 4 stars

Starring Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, Gustav Frohlich
Directed by Fritz Lang

While watching this silent film I found myself making viewing adjustments, due to the limitations of the media at the time. I kept turning the orchestral audio on and off, eventually settling with it on. In this day and age of surround sound and director’s audio commentary, watching a silent film may seem like a chore, not unlike swapping an iPod for a turntable. However, Metropolis is well worth the effort - its limitations become its strengths.

The film is set in Metropolis, a huge, Gothic, monolithic city where an elite, educated class oversees a blue-collar working one. The leader is Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel) who has a son, Fredersen (Gustav Frohlich). The latter falls in love with Maria (Brigitte Helm), a worker who acts as a religious figurehead for a burgeoning rebellion. In order to counteract this revolt, John hires the mad scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to bult a robot in Maria’s likeness.

The scenes of the robot coming to life are so expertly done that it’s hard to image their creation before computer graphics, let alone in 1927. Much of the scenery is made up of epic painting, backdrops, and miniatures. Crowds of people charge up stairs or building towers, and it’s a safe bet that they’re actual crowds, making their accomplishments more impressive than digital copy and paste.

Black and white film is an advantage when the Rotwang pursues Maria in order to build the robot. The dark, winding tunnels are deeply ominous with a lone flashlight grasping in the darkness.

The actors, unable to rely on sound, display a mesmerizing style of acting unfamiliar to modern audiences - it’s communication through facial expressions and the entire body. Maria contorts her body out of fear or Freder scours a building in search of her, pounding on doors. When dejected, his body slumps like a puppet without its life-giving hand.

Metropolis sometimes misses the mark in its imagining of the future. The plot is dystopian with a dash of dated epic Wagnerian quest elements. The city reaches skyward with elevated monorails, totalitarian machines, and flying cars, while the actuality of urban environments in 2006 is quite a more horrific opposite, with endless suburban urban sprawl, and gridlocked traffic. We’ve constructed a much more horizontal than vertical urban environment.

The more resonant theme today is the class struggle between the wealthy who benefit from the city’s luxury and the worker underclass - suppressed beneath - that actually constructs it. Class struggle is shown literally, with the white-collar business types residing in the sky and the grubby working class confined to caves beneath the earth. The theme of class struggle is timeless, for so long as society exists there will be those with power and those without. I wish more science fiction films would tackle social themes. Instead, many films (Star Wars, The Matrix, Blade Runner) seem inspired by the visual future prognistication displayed in Metropolis.

I feel that in the absence of huge blockbuster special effects, many now-classic films pre-1950 had to rely on dialogue and expert acting to make the stories work, resulting in a very differnent film experience. Metropolis at times resembles a play, but once I adjusted, it took on a revelatory life. There are great ideas in our past.

There are many versions of this film out there on DVD and I viewed the Kino video restoration.

IMDB: Metropolis
Wikipedia: Metropolis
Rotten Tomatoes: Metropolis 98%

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Categories: 4 Star Movies, Movies :: Tags: 4 stars, Alfred Abel, Brigitte Helm, Fritz Lang, Gustav Frohlich :: Trackback URL
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