One of my goals during 2024: A Star Wars Event is to talk about movies that inspired George Lucas to create the franchise. You can easily look up lists of influential films, but how many people nowadays have actually seen The Dam Busters or Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe? I was originally going to talk about Seven Samurai today but decided to dedicate a whole week to Mr. Akira Kurosawa films later on, so what else to cover? I wasn’t in the mood for WWII dog fights or Nazi propaganda so that left… oh, hey! Frit Lang’s Metropolis! It’s been a minute since I’ve seen it, and it might be the oldest film that inspired Lucas. So let’s start there!
And for reference, I’m watching the 2 and a half hour restored version, which I’ll get into later.
Based on the 1925 novel of the same name written by Thea von Harbou–director Fritz Lang’s wife–Metropolis is a story about a divided society. The rich live in an extravagant city–a metropolis, if you will–while the poor workers literally live underground. This divide is brought to Freder (Gustav Fröhlich)’s attention when a woman we learn later is named Maria (Brigitte Helm) brings a group of children to the surface to remind everyone–socialite and drudge–that they are brothers. Freder’s reaction to this is to be stunned by how hot Maria is! He first goes to his father, Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel) who is in charge of the metropolis and doesn’t give a shit about his workers. In fact, Joh fires his assistant, Josaphat (Theodor Loos), which shocks Freder enough that he tells Josaphat to hang out at his place, making a lifelong friend. Or at least movielong. Then following Maria underground, Freder sees a fatal work mishap which he hallucinates as slaves having their bodies sacrificed to Moloch. Suddenly very class conscious, he takes over the job for a man named Georgy (Erin Biswanger). Meanwhile, Joh goes to a mad scientist named Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) who is jealous that Joh’s dead wife (and Freder’s mother) used to love him, which is hilarious since Klein-Rogge was married to Thea von Harbou until she left him for Fritz Lang. Anyway, Rotwang has created a machine man–which inspired Lucas’ vision of C-3PO, throwing that here cause it doesn’t fit anywhere else–that he swears is only a week away from being indistinguishable from a real person. Back with Freder, he joins several workers in going deeper underground to attend a sermon of Maria’s where she retells the Tower of Babel, but instead of being struck down by God the workers were mistreated and rose up. Her message is the mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart, which is the message of the movie. Hey, wait…
Brief aside, by this point in the silent film I started to wonder about the message. On the surface this is clearly a movie about the horrible divide between the rich and the poor, and the film will go on to show the workers rising up against their masters. Hell yeah! Except… that’s not the message of the film. The workers are wrong for destroying the machines they work on, just as the rich are wrong for abusing them. This is not an anti-capitalist movie, but rather one that says the current class divide resulting from capitalism is bad and should be fixed. A bit more milquetoast than I had remembered, to be sure.
Back to the plot, Joh finds out about his son and Maria, then tasks Rotwang with abducting the woman and using her likeness for the machine man to rile up the workers, which would let him crush them in retaliation. The robotic Maria has a few quirks, but everyone mistakes her for the real woman. Joh and Rotwang even have their creation dance at a seedy club, which Freder apparently sees in a vision where the fake Maria is riding the Beast of Revelation, making her the Whore of Babylon. The rich would murder each other to be with her, which is just the start of her chaos, all according to Rotwang’s secret plan. When “Maria” tells the workers that their promised mediator isn’t coming and that they should rise up and destroy the machines, Freder is the only one who realizes something’s up. Then in a scene that’s entirely missing and is described only in text boxes, Joh attacks Rotwang when he realizes the scientist is working against him, and the real Maria escapes. When the workers destroy their machines it causes their underground city to start flooding, which is where all their children are. As Maria, Freder, and Josaphat work to save the children, the workers’ prancing is interrupted by Grot (Heinrich George), a worker for the now destroyed Heart Machine, furiously telling the workers that they put their children’s lives in danger. Realizing they’ve been played by “Maria,” they hunt down the witch to burn her. Too bad fake Maria is debauchedly partying with the rich so they instead find the real Maria. A chase breaks out, but the Marias get switched so the mob manages to nab the right one. The wrong…? The robot one. The people literally burn her at the stake and are horrified when she is revealed to be a robot, but where’s the real Maria? She’s being chased by Rotwang, who thinks she’s the robot that he will repurpose into Joh’s dead wife. Freder fights the villain and Rotwang falls to his death. The day is saved, but Joh refuses to shake hands with Grot. The head and the hands are at an impasse, but Freder is the promised mediator, the heart, here to bridge the gap.
Like I said, not anti-capitalist, but not pro-excessive capitalism. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Joh doesn’t even really suffer anything for all his scheming other than his hair turning white from panicking over his son. He’s clearly the villain, but no, Rotwang is the one who dies to give this a middle-of-the-road happy ending.
As I said before, this is the nearly complete version. When the film was released in 1927 the reaction was mixed, as are the reports on what the reaction was. But when it came to foreign distribution, a deal with Paramount cut the film down to a little over an hour and a half. The deleted footage was thought lost until they were discovered–in poor condition–in Buenos Aires in 2008. The 2010 restoration added those scenes, which you can tell by their worse quality compared to the digitally restored rest of the film. But now details missing for decades are present, like Rotwang’s obsession with Joh’s dead wife, completely absent in the versions we had up to that point because her name was Hel and that’s too close to Hell for American audiences. Other inclusions are the most scenes with the Thin Man (Fritz Rasp), a man Joh hired to follow his son who, in one of the few scenes that were kept in the truncated version, delivers one hell of a line: when Joh realizes Freder is underground as everything is going to shit, he demands to know where his son is, to which the Thin Man responds, “Tomorrow, thousands will ask in fury and desperation: Joh Fredersen, where is my son?!” A chilling silent delivery, and not incorrect.
So now we get to everyone’s favorite game, This Was Made During the Weimar Republic So How Many Cast and Crew Became Nazis? Did I say favorite? My mistake, nobody wanted this. Anyway, the answer is not as many as I was dreading! Fritz Lang was in America when the Nazis took over and was involved in creating the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. Gustav Fröhlich allegedly slapped Joseph Goebbels, so major props to him if true. Brigitte Helm was disgusted by the Nazis–and also wasn’t a fan of talkie films–so she moved to Switzerland in 1935 and never acted again. I couldn’t find much on Alfred Abel directly, but his daughter, Ursula, was blacklisted by the Nazis because she didn’t have the right ancestry papers to prove her father wasn’t a Jew. And somewhere in the middle, Thea von Harbou did associate with the Nazi Party, but later claimed she was secretly helping Indian immigrants like Ayi Tendulkar, her husband after Lang. But not everyone resisted the Nazi regime; Rudolf Klein-Rogge worked with the Nazis, but allegedly fell out of favor later in the war. Theodor Loos was part of the Reichsfilmkammer, or Reich Chamber of Film, and Henrich George died in a camp for Nazi collaborators in 1946, so there’s that.
Metropolis is a classic film, but I am a little bummed it didn’t go as anti-capitalist as I would’ve liked …but I’ll take it as pro-union! It’s not that much of a stretch! Kickin’ ass for the working class!
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