“How was Metropolis?” Shana asked. I’d finally gotten around to watching the new, restored version of Fritz Lang’s classic 1927 silent film, which she’d spotted on the cable schedule and kindly recorded for me.

“Crazypants,” I said. How else to describe such a brilliant, searing, visionary, hot mess?

I tried to sketch out the plot for her.

“It’s about a futuristic city where the rich people live in spectacular skyscrapers and the workers live underground. The children of privilege wear bright silky clothes and cavort in pleasure gardens. Whereas the workers’ children dress like Dickensian urchins and live under constant threat of being drowned.”

Not exactly a promising beginning. Her ears perked up as I described the father/son tension at the center of the movie, and the son’s weird romance with a kind of prophetess of the underground, but I could feel her interest start to fade somewhere between the phrases “dystopian Art Deco science fiction” and “pseudo-socialist critique of capitalism.”

“Oh,” I said, “and there a robot, one of the first robots in moviedom, which is cooked up by a mad scientist called ‘Rotwang.’ I know! Rotwang. Great name. The robot looks like a cross between Ultraman and a lingerie manikin. Anyway, Rotwang grafts the face and body of a beautiful woman — who happens to be the love-interest of the hero — onto his man-machine, and then makes it do burlesque dances that drive the sons of the aristocracy crazy with lust. And then he makes it give cynical speeches to the workers, to the effect that the great ‘Mediator,’ a supposed messiah who will liberate the workers from their awful toil, is never actually going to show up. This drives the workers and their wives mad with rage, and causes them to rise up and smash the gigantic Heart Machine…”

There was just no way to make it sound good. And I was trying really hard.

Metropolis was the Avatar of its day; i.e., the most expensive, most technically advanced movie ever made. And like Avatar, what’s brilliant about it can’t really be explained in terms of its plot, which seems like a mash-up of Frankenstein, the Book of Genesis, and Das Kapital.

With a bit of hanky-panky tossed in for good measure.

Metropolis is a movie that needs to be seen to be appreciated. The sets are jaw-dropping; the cast enormous; the special effects remarkably convincing, even to a jaded modern viewer. No visual detail is too small to be ignored. In some ways it’s more like a luxury liner than a movie, the Titanic of the cinema.

And like the Titanic, it foundered on its maiden voyage. It was just too long. At 148 minutes, it stretched almost a full hour longer than its competition in theaters. Theater-owners demanded that it be shortened.

Beyond the film’s length, its themes, particularly the destructive tension between workers and the “capitalist elite,” made people nervous. Remember: this was 1927. The Soviet Union was a rising world power. The Russian revolution was only a decade old.

Although Metropolis is now considered a treasure of world cinema and one of the most influential movies ever made, critics at the time weren’t impressed. The science fiction author H.G. Wells criticized the movie as “foolishness, cliché, platitude, and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general.”

Even more painful than the tepid critical response was the film’s abysmal performance at the box office. Unlike Avatar, whose unprecedented costs were more than offset by its unprecedented profits, Metropolis was such a monstrous flop that it bankrupted the German state-supported studio that produced it.

Immediately after its release, the film was cut down to size for American theaters. The most controversial elements were edited out. The Metropolis that European and American audiences watched bore little resemblance to the film that Fritz Lang, its supremely talented director, envisioned.

In fact, until this year, the director’s cut was thought to be permanently lost. A digital restoration was undertaken on the “censored” version.

And then, in one of those bizarre twists that belongs in a movie, a battered, but complete, print of the original director’s cut was uncovered in Argentina, which was able to supply the missing scenes.

You might be able to find the magnificently restored film on a cable channel like TCM. If you subscribe to Netflix and can stream video from the Web, you can watch Metropolis at home tonight.

See for yourself.

Then tell me if “crazypants” even begins to describe it.

 

 

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 02 December 2010

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com