Movie Minx

Starring: Brigitte Helm, Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich
Directed by: Fritz Lang

Plot: It is the future, and humans are divided into two groups: the thinkers, who make plans (but don’t know how anything works), and the workers, who achieve goals (but don’t have the vision). Completely separate, neither group is complete, but together they make a whole. One man from the “thinkers” dares visit the underground where the workers toil, and is astonished by what he sees…

But is it any good?

I finally managed to watch Metropolis after discovering a restored version on DVD in the coolest video store ever called Dunkel (Dark) in Berlin. It had been on my list of films to see forever, but as it was a long, silent film I wasn’t in a huge hurry. After I had watched it I was so impressed that I did a bit of research:

Metropolis was made for $US2 million, a small fortune at the time and epic on the scale of DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (but much less racist). Taking over a year to film and with a cast of 40,000 people - surely half the planet in those days? - Metropolis sadly flopped at the box office. In fact, it was such a flop that the leading actress pronounced it horrible and then denied being in it at all.

Set in the year 2000 and filmed in the pre-computer era (hard to believe when you see it), Metropolis is German director Fritz Lang’s vision of the future. He may not have gotten everything right - our buildings aren’t quite as tall as he envisaged in his panoramic shots of the city - but he wasn’t too far off.

One subsequent drawback for Lang was that his talent was spotted by Mr Hitler and Mr Goebbels, who wanted to recruit Lang to make Nazi propaganda films for them. Lang wisely told them he’d think about it, then ran home, packed his bags and fled the country that very same day. Working in Paris and later the US, Lang was apparently a stroppy director and disliked by many.

Anyway, in a nutshell, Metropolis is about a big city that seems utopian and wonderful, but in reality is run underground by slave workers who unsurprisingly seem none too happy about the situation. At the beginning, a spoilt Daddy’s Boy stumbles upon this underground world and vows to change society. He of course falls in love with a pretty girl from the “other side” and then things are thwarted by an evil scientist with crazy hair and way, way too much eye makeup. The scientist builds a robot that will work for the minimum wage and like it, and everything builds up to a climax and a sappy ending which apparently the director hated.

Despite the expected lack of editing, dearth of decent cameras and the exaggerated acting typical of silent films, Metropolis was astoundingly ahead of its time, with massive floods, picture phones (albeit enormous ones) and futuristic skyscrapers. It also seems to predict tyrannical leaders, divided cities and reunification, which was of course all to come for Germany.

I would recommend Metropolis to anyone interested in film, and find it very hard to understand how it can perch so close to Braveheart in top movie lists. And who can think Blade Runner is original after viewing this thrilling masterpiece, I ask rhetorically?

My rating: 9/10 (simply because some aspects have dated)

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