OK, I said at the end of the previous entry that I wasn’t sure what version I would be seeing of Metropolis. There’s a good reason for that: the original version is long since lost. Most of the film still exists, but different versions are more complete than others. That doesn’t mean the version I found (on Tubi of all places) was complete. Some title screens appear at one point to explain what happened in some missing scenes. I’ve seen this film before once or twice, but usually with an electronic film score. This version, running for two and a half hours, didn’t have that. It had a somewhat standard piano score, a jaunty, nondescript tune that just repeated itself every few minutes.
Yeah, that got real old, real fast. Tubi’s commercial breaks were an unexpected relief from the nonstop piano music that didn’t even much match up what was happening in the film. But what about the rest of the film?
Metropolis, a silent German expressionist film that has absolutely nothing to do with Superman, comes from director Fritz Lang, and it is, if nothing else, incredibly impressive to look at from the start. The title city is clearly divided by social class. The workers run the city’s vast machines and live in an equally massive underground city while the rich live in towering skyscrapers and live a life of general debauchery high in the clouds. It’s high enough that airplanes fly around the higher buildings. And yes, let’s point out the obvious right now: this is not a subtle film.
To be fair, silent films often aren’t, and for good reason: without much in the way of dialogue, the films had to find a way to tell a story and spread whatever message they had in the broadest manner possible. The opening scene shows a shift change in the depths of the city where all the machines are, and lines of men in formation don’t so much walk as trudge in and out, heads down, and more or less in lock step like the machines they constantly work on. Their faceless lives are an obvious drudgery, and I can’t even tell whether the people shuffling towards or away from the camera are the ones going to work. There has to be somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred or so men in these shots, no exaggeration. This is a silent film: they don’t have the technology to create CGI crowds here.
And then to make sure things are obvious, the film turns to the “Club of Sons” where Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), son of the city’s top man Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), frolics and plays, complete with a garden where young women are selected to play with him every day, and some of those women are wearing what looks like largely transparent tops where they may not be topless, but they might as well be. Freder’s nonstop, carefree life comes to a halt, however, when he sees Maria (Brigitte Helm), a resident of the lower city, bringing the workers’ children up to see the grandeur of the city where the rich live off their fathers’ hard labor. Maria’s loveliness is enough to catch Freder’s eye, and from here, he’ll work to see the workers’ lives improve even as his father shows little to no concern for anyone but himself, to the point where he’ll try to recruit the mad scientist and inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) for help keeping an eye on his son.
As I said, Metropolis is a not a subtle film, but it does have subtle moments. While the different buildings of the city dwarf the people and vehicles seen moving along the elevated roadways, the film takes a moment to retell the story of the Tower of Babel. That story, in the Bible’s book of Genesis, is essentially the story of where different languages come from. The people of Babel were building a tower to show their own glory by reaching to the stars only for God to punish their arrogance by changing their languages from one tongue to many, ending the project. This retelling suggests the language barrier was caused in other ways: laborers were put to work and were unable to understand why the wealthy planners wanted the tower in the first place, and the language barrier was one of both groups misunderstanding each other until violence breaks out and ends the tower that way. The barrier here is more one of class and money, and it is an obvious parallel to the situation for the characters in the city. This version of the parable is related by Maria to a crowd of workers with Freder listening in.
Not long after that, Maria is kindapped and taken to Rotwang where he replaces her with a robot lookalike to both end Freder’s interest on behalf of his father and to later revenge himself on Fredersen for the crime of stealing the heart of the woman Rotwang loved. Said woman, named Hel, herself died after giving birth to Freder. And while this motivation exists from Rotwang’s very first scene, it also does something else: it somewhat lets Fredersen off the hook.
For most of the film, the uncaring Fredersen is the clear villain though in many ways, it could be said capitalism itself with Fredersen as its representative could be the real villain. The robotic Maria is as different as the human one in terms of personality as it is possible to get, and the way she riles the workers up to smash the system could be seen as justice long delayed. However, smashing the machines only starts to flood the workers’ underground city where all the workers’ children still are as their mothers and fathers take to rioting in the streets. Yes, this is Rotwang’s plan to ruin Fredersen’s life’s work by destroying the city, and it does take the combined efforts of the real Maria, Freder, and Freder’s sidekick Josaphat (Theodor Loos) to make sure the children don’t drown. Meanwhile, Robo-Maria is living it up with wealthy fools who don’t need much encouraging to watch the city go to the devil.
It’s the swivel at that moment, the one that keeps Fredersen from being the real villain, that can make this film out to be something other than some sort of anti-capitalist cinematic manifesto. It’s one that suggests that Freder (and not Maria) can be the mediator to make the city work for everyone and not, I dunno, using the advanced robotic tech Rotwang was inventing to make everyone’s life easier and maybe keep the workers from having to work. Director Fritz Lang’s film does show the workers as being easily riled to the point of violence while forgetting their own children until it is almost too late, but Fredersen doesn’t seem like a misunderstood genius or something. He’s a cold man who only finds himself caring when he thinks he is going to lose his son and city. If he cared earlier, maybe he could have avoided all that.
Still, Metropolis is an excellent achievement, a film that represents big ideas through big sets and settings. My complaints about the film’s “swerve” to make Rotwang the villain aside, there’s a lot to admire here, particularly how Helm can channel the subtle Maria and then go to the over-the-top robotic version of her in a way that always allows the audience to know who is who. It’s not subtle, but then again, neither is the film as a whole. That’s one of the things that makes the film a classic even if there are some scenes missing.
NEXT: I’m sticking with a silent film that offers a critique of modern technology, but in a much more comedic way as Charlie Chaplin appears for the first time in this challenge with 1936’s Modern Times.
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