Metropolis: It's Great, But Is It Good?

Posted on Friday September 10, 2010, 16:48 by Helen O'Hara in Empire States

This week sees the reissue of the remastered, restored, spiffed up and super-duper Metropolis. If you like to call yourself a movie fan, you should go see it. If you like science fiction, you owe it to yourself to go meet one of Star Wars, and Avatar's, and Blade Runner's, ancestors. Since I am both a movie lover and a sci-fi nut and since, to my shame, I'd never seen it, I took the opportunity to go along last Friday to a press screening - and I have a few quick warnings for those of you headed to Metropolis.

First and foremost, this is two and a half hours long. Don't do what I did and blithely assure your website creative director that, "It's old; I'll be back in 90 mintes". An epic failure to check the press release on my part? Certainly. Still, I have visions of people making the same mistake. People with dinner reservations. The horror!  What's nice about this new cut is that it has over half an hour of previously excised footage has been reinserted, helping the movie make some sort of sense, but what's bad is that that puts it up to 150 minutes. So just be aware, go to the loo before it starts and enjoy. The plot, in case you don't know, is set in the titular mega-city, where the masses of poor toil away in giant underground machines at apparently Sisyphean tasks, while the rich live in the "Eternal Gardens" high above, and attend to stock machines. The city boss' son, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) falls for a saintly teacher, Maria (Brigitte Helm) who visits the Gardens to show her class how the world is divided, and heads into the depths to investigate her world, and to find her. Meanwhile, a scientist called Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) builds a robot (also Helm) who will tear the city apart. It's all in revenge for Freder's father, Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), stealing Rotwang's girlfriend years before. Cue robot-led uprisings and lots of action.

Secondly, this story dates from 1927. "Cool," you might think. "There'll be flappers, and maybe Jeeves and Wooster will cameo" (Spoiler: they don't.) But no: I need you to really think about that. 1927 was, in movie terms, the Bronze Age. Directors had learned how to point a camera (and boy had they, in Lang's case) but "acting" still consisted chiefly of donning too much eyeliner and getting busy with the powder puff. The hero of this piece and its romantic lead, Gustav Fröhlich's Freder, has weirdly similar bone structure to Johnny Depp, but makes Depp's less sane protagonists look like John Major, what with the eyerolling and the broad gestures and the snow-white face. Brigitte Helm, in the dual role of the saintly Maria and her robot lookalike, varies between simpering beatifically and cackling maniacally to make crystal clear which is which. Both, for some reason, clutch their breasts a lot*. You're going to be tempted to laugh, maybe, but remember that this was a very different time, and that the coming of sound changed things a lot.

Thirdly, the struggle-of-the-proletariat subplot is more of an uber-plot. It's interesting, in a historical way, to watch a film so concerned with the political upheavals of a vanished time - especially knowing where history headed, and learning how the flooding of a fictional city was probably the least of everyone's worries. But it's also so in-your-face with its message that it makes Michael Moore look shy and retiring.

So by modern standards, this isn't in all respects good, and I must confess that, coming out of it last Friday, I wasn't as blown away as I'd hoped to be. But here's the thing: after a few hours and days consideration, what remains firmly in my mind is the astonishing visuals that Fritz Lang cooked up - the robot girl, the towering city with its elevated roads, the enormous machines - and the effects he managed with them - one shot of a machine turning into a pagan temple is as good as anything you'll see for the following 40 years, and would not look disreputable in a modern picture. You can see, too, the pains he took to imagine a world different to his own: the Eternal Gardens where young men frolic with scantily-clad (but well-bred ) women in a way unthinkable even to the forward-thinking flappers of the 1920s; the gigantic machines; the impossibly huge, Babel-like towers. That is Metropolis' true genius, that's why people keep going back to it, and that's why it's remained so hugely important to film.

And while it's tempting to laugh at some of the extremes here, it seems to me that we as a film-going public need to distinguish between "campy" and "of a different era". Not every film dating from before 1990 is campy. It is not always appropriate to burst out laughing at some of the more over-the-top acting styles out there, and in fact can result in great films being unfairly vilified**. Take a deep breath, acknowledge that bits of this are going to be weird to modern eyes, and dive in.

I'm not claiming that it's going to be your favourite film of the year. There's an argument that seeing a film this venerable is like eating your greens: it may not be the tastiest option, but it's probably the best for you. But Metropolis, in the end, is absolutely brilliant and absolutely worth your time. However bizarre the acting or on-the-nose the title cards may appear, this is a piece of living, breathing history. It's like your granny. Show it some respect.

*Like, a LOT. Like more chest-grabs than you'd seen in a month's worth of lad's mags.

**Edgar Wright, when he visited Empire recently, was chatting about the difficulties in creating programmes and special seasons of classic horror movies for just this reason. Not everything that's dubbed, or subtitled, or old, has to be amusing.