Metropolis – directed by Fritz Lang. SciFi. 148 minutes Black And White Silent 1927.
★★★
The Story: In a modernistic city controlled by an oligarch, his son enters the bleak world of the lowly workers to make things better.
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Fritz Lang is in possession of a reputation for high art which leaves me stumped. When I read David Thomson on Lang, I don’t doubt the enthusiasm of what Thomson is saying, but I don’t see it evidenced in the films. I don’t see Lang as a telling director of actors. I don’t see his working with difficult or timeless subjects. I don’t see a visual style that is ever a narrative force in and of itself. He’s not a bad director, but it seems to me that his reputation stems from his professional associations rather than with his innate gifts.
Lang’s big name comes from his work in Germany — from Metropolis, M, two of the Mabuse films, and several others — from before 1933 when he withdrew his fortune and emigrated to France and Hollywood. The remarkable thing about those films is that they were all conceived not by Lang at all, but by a woman, Thea von Harbou who wrote them. She became his wife, and, both before and after her association with Lang, was the top script writer of German films.
Lang also had to hand various highly skilled technicians, and much of the critical attention to him stems from the presence of the spectacular sets in his work. He also had the creative genius of Gunther Rittau to conceive and execute the filming of the renowned special effects of Metropolis. And he, of course, had a remarkable cinema-photographer, who was to go on to shoot Garbo’s Camille, Pride And Prejudice, Tortilla Flat, Without Love, and Key Largo and end up – and then on to being hired by Desi for his inventiveness with cameras and to film I Love Lucy. It is none other than the great Carl Freund. What we are seeing, it seems to me, probably belongs to all these people, rather than to Lang.
I feel Lang is a director without a vision and not much heart. I feel he is drawn to the obvious. Jamie Lee Curtis said, with pride, that her mother the actress Janet Leigh took on anything the studios threw at her. I feel Lang did the same, but with a mean streak. He directed because he liked to live well. His subjects are the psychological small potatoes of human life. A large subject, as here, he reduces to a maxim. On the other end of his spectrum for platitude he indulges in conflagrations, which is like someone who can’t get their own way having a tantrum. He sat by the camera, pressed the button, and whole sets would explode.
Metropolis establishes its cliché from the start, just as each and every modern science fiction movie does, by making the Metropolis a dystopia. The drive to hold onto the lineage of the dictator’s dominance is both enforced and undermined by a mad inventor who is able to recreate in a robot the love he lost years before to the dictator. She comes to life as a Duessa version of the Una version of the heroine who wishes to reform the Metropolis, and both of these, in identical dresses, are very well played by Brigitte Helm.
Lang nearly burned her to death in the immolation scene (he was never very good with actors). But he is here and elsewhere served well by his German character people and a zillion extras. However, on all available occasions demanding an impression, his leading man lodges his irises in the middle of his eye sockets and stares vividly, a one-size fits all technique. He is like many Silent film actors who tend to rely on lots of mascara for their art.
It’s a film worth seeing, for it is felt to be the greatest film ever to be made in Germany, at one with the work of Beethoven and Bach. I don’t see it that way — after all, it’s science fiction, a genre that forbids depth by very definition. It’s pulp made to appear important with lots of mascara. But you must make up your own mind. If you can face the delirium and live.