Nothing like "Metropolis," the ambitious Ufa production that has created wide international comment, has been seen on the screen. It, therefore, stands alone, in some respects, as a remarkable achievement. It is a technical marvel with feet of clay, a picture as soulless as the manufactured woman of its story. Its scenes bristle with cinematic imagination, with hordes of men and women and astounding stage settings. It is hardly a film to be judged by its narrative, for despite the fantastic nature of the story, it is, on the whole, unconvincing, lacking in suspense and at times extravagantly theatric. It suggests a combination of a preachment on capital and labor in a city of the future, an R. U. R. idea and something of Mrs. Shelley's "Frankenstein." Its moral is that the brains and the hands fail when the heart (love) does not work with them. The brains represent capital, and the hands, labor.
The production itself appears to have been a Frankenstein model to the story. Fritz Lang, the famous German director who was responsible for the "Siegfried" film, handled the making of the photodrama. Occasionally it strikes one that he wanted to include too much and then that all one anticipates does not appear. But at the same time the various ideas have been spliced together quite adroitly. It is a subject on which an adverse comment has to be taken from the perspective of the enormity of the task, as most other pictures would fade into insignififcance if compared to it. When one criticizes the halting steps of workmen, their stagy efforts to demonstrate fatigue and even the lacking details of life in this metropolis, one realizes that there is in this screen effort much that borders on symbolism.
The narrative is based on a novel by Mr. Lang's wife, Thea von Harbou, who also supplied the manuscripts for "The Indian Mausoleum" and "Siegfried." Roughly, it concerns an inventor who makes a woman from a real woman, without injuring the latter. This manufactured Mary at first is employed to quell the dissatisfied workers, but by some queer freak she eventually incites the men and women laborers to rebel against the wealthiest man in Metropolis.
Here the producer shows the laborers living in tall buildings underground, while the families of the wealthy enjoy the fresh air and sunshine atop a great skyscraper. Metropolis is ruled by John Masterman, a man of great brain and whose only soft spot in his heart is for his son, Eric. This son falls in love with Mary, one of the workers, and he, in sympathy for those who work and dwell far under the ground, becomes one of the underlings, much against his father's wishes.
Mr. Lang introduces the up-to-date appliances in Masterman's office, including a giant board with push buttons and the television means of communication, whereby he can see the man to whom he is talking but himself can't be seen. You see a quailing man going to the telephone to talk with Masterman. This ruler of Metropolis also has his secretaries, who stand in abject fear of him, and one of these, a bloodless, square-headed individual in whom hone predominates, is delegated to watch Eric. This secretary has a slanting forehead and a receding chin, an excellent type for the heartless Masterman.
Some idea of the prodigious work in this production can be imagined when it is said that about 37,000 extras were engaged in some of the episodes. Eleven thousand of the men have shaven heads. These workers are perceived storming the gates of the underground tunnel, and are also beheld going to and from their daily toil. The relief watch walks with easy step, while the others, tired after their hours of monotonous work, are halting in their gait and bent of back.
The sequence in which Rotwang, the inventor, manufactures a double of Mary is put forth in a startling fashion, Rotwang first gives chase to the real Mary, and then puts her in a glass cylinder, around which appear circles of radium lights. To add to the impression, there are boiling liquids in glass globes, and finally the Mary without a soul is produced with the help of an iron Robotlike woman Rotwang had made previously. The artificial Mary, the "woman" who could walk and talk but possessed no soul, has queer drooping underlids to her eyes. She leers at those who approach her. In one sequence she stirs the multitude of workers with her arguments in favor of Masterman, and in another she is seen as a dancing queen. Meanwhile the real Mary has been shut up in a chamber in Rotwang's house of many doors.
In the last chapter of this picture, after the artificial Mary has turned traitor to Rotwang and Masterman, the "woman" is discovered and burned. During this scene the manufactured Mary suddenly changes into the form of the metal creature. There is a flood underground, and it is through the fact that Eric and the real Mary save the workers' children that Masterman himself is spared.
Brigitte Helm is extraordinarily fine in the rôles of the real and the artificial Mary. Alfred Abel gives a vivid portrayal of Masterman, and Gustav Froelich is excellent as Eric. Rudolf Klein-Rogge is splendid as the inventor. The cast is remarkably well chosen.
A Technical Marvel.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9A05E2D8143BE13ABC4F53DFB566838C639EDE
