I took in the latest restoration of Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis last night on its short run at the Castro Theater. Here we have the most complete Metropolis yet, assembled from a combination of the 2001 restoration—which came closer than ever to the movie’s original running time and continuity—as well as a virtually complete print discovered in 2008 in Buenos Aires. One has to allow for the rotten condition of the Buenos Aires print; it contrasts dreadfully with the 2001 restoration footage. But that’s no real matter. It’s great to have the film back intact after 80+ years of abuse.
That isn’t to say that it’s an exemplar of perfect filmmaking. Metropolis is a potboiler, a creaky melodramatic job streaked through with character motivations so transparent they almost seem lifted from a kid’s book. Tell the crowd "tear down the city" and by gumbo they start tearing it down. Tell them "your children are all dead and it’s all this woman’s fault" and jiminy cricket they’ve hauled her up on a pyre and lit the match. Tell them "oh, actually your kids are OK" and they’re crying and weeping in joy and dancing in the streets. In a city filled with scantily-dressed and clearly available women, young men are inflamed into murderous lust by a scantily-dressed dancing woman (a humaniform robot). The heroine is a Vestal Virgin who spends most of her time screaming, running from villains, or batting her eyelashes at the milksop hero. The quintessential mad scientist seeks revenge on the entire city because the chief administrator married the woman he loved. The characters in Metropolis are either cardboard cutouts or cartoon figures.
But even back in 1927 nobody was much interested in Metropolis for its plot or character development. The cool thing then, as now, was the technique and technology on display. In some ways it’s even more intriguing nowadays, given that all the futurism of the movie has acquired a distinctly antique cast, all Art Deco and Buck Rogers-ish. The whipcrack clarity of the best restored scenes unfortunately highlights the sloppiness of the set dressings—you can see the seams, lumps in the paint, chips and holes in the flimsy backdrops, greasy fingerprints on the doors, and stains on the carpet. Fortunately, the famous big operatic set pieces remain as impressive as ever: the "Moloch" machine with its slave laborers all moving in synchronized jerks to the film score, the views of the city itself with its skyscrapers and elevated roadways, the steam-filled caverns and their clocklike machines, the robot and its transformation into human form.
But the technology isn’t the only fascination. Metropolis takes a harsh look at 20th-century notions of "progress", both technological and economic. As a metaphor for the coming Nazi ascendance in Germany, Metropolis runs chills down your spine as the workers stagger down the hall on their way home, while others stagger to their shifts, everybody staggering in perfect unison. Not to mention the indifference shown towards those workers by the governing powers who live high up above it all. But one needn’t single out National Socialism; when you get right down to it, Metropolis is a blanket condemnation of unregulated capitalism, an unsentimental and unblinking look at the grimy underbelly of Reaganomics and trickle-down economics. It would be hard to imagine an economic-themed film from a short-lived period of stability during the Weimar Republic to be otherwise.
Metropolis can seem like one classic film archetype after another. There’s Rotwang, the mad scientist, the prototype so wonderfully parodied by Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove. His laboratory—complete with arcs, flashing lights, bubbling beakers, rays, and knife switches—is the obvious model for all of those Frankenstein labs to come. The statuesque female robot, the film’s most iconic image, becomes the villain—shades of 2001 and Blade Runner. The gleaming city that is supported on near-slave labor looks forward to George Lucas’s THX and Logan’s Run. And the film’s obvious hatred of technology and its conviction that machines are enslaving humankind runs as a leitmotiv throughout both sci-fi and film history. In Metropolis, only the places free from machines—the catacomb, the cathedral—allow people to express love or compassion. Otherwise, the technological world is represented by concentration-camp-like horrors, grimly efficient offices that consume bureaucrats like so much waste paper, or else the endless party in the louche "Yoshiwara" red-light district.
Despite its many flaws in both character and plot, and its octogenarian-plus age, it remains fascinating, surely one of the great film achievements. Oh, unintentional humor crops up from time to time—as the occasional guffaw from the audience last night made clear—but Metropolis still offers an absorbing viewing experience. I understand that a DVD/Blu-Ray of this latest restoration, complete with Gottfried Huppertz’s Wagnerian-influenced original score, is due out in November. Definitely belongs on the must-have list.