#69: Metropolis

Metropolis (1926, Lang)

Metropolis is a film made in a time before actors with any actual talent wanted anything to do with moving pictures. The whole thing reminds me of the parodies of silent films in Singin In The Rain. I don't understand the critical praise. The basic idea behind the plot is an excellent idea. A futuristic utopia maintained by an underground city of slaves. But the only way to ignore the cheesy plotting, the poor production and the silent film overacting is to take the film historian perspective that because it was made in 1926, all the flaws are actually virtues. That argument doesn't hold much weight with me, because Murnau had all the same setbacks and made silent films that look a whole lot better with characters who could pass for human.

Then of course there's the 'robot duplicate' plot, which doesn't make sense at all if you think about it for three seconds. You'd think the workers would notice their messiah suddenly had an eye twitch for no apparent reason and completely changed her message, instead of blindly following her to violent revolution. "Let's destroy the machines, thereby flooding our city!" (Later) "Oh wait, our children are in the city! Crap. KILL THE WITCH! It's her fault we didn't apply basic common sense to our actions!"

Lang does some neat stuff with double exposures, except far inferior to what Murnau does with them. Everything has a sort of deliberately cheesy mad scientist vibe to it. The film has Marxist overtones and offers the solution for all class conflict for there to be a mediator between the leaders and the workers, and of course the main character is THE ONE who can be the mediator. (If only they'd thought of unionizing!) It's said that Metropolis is one of the most influential scifi films. Maybe that means I should blame Metropolis for all the annoying camp and oversimplified politics that plagued the genre for decades.

The DVD I've been watching says 'Over a quarter of the footage has been lost forever.' Only, checking the Metropolis page at imdb.com, a negative of the original film was just found and is going to be showed in Berlin on February 10th. Which means I need to go sell this version on ebay now before other people hear about this.

Rating: * 1/2 / 5

I'm realizing now that Magnificent Ambersons is on Youtube. Maybe I should rush and try to see it that way before somebody does something about that. (Yeah yeah. I'll pay for it when somebody freaking lets me.)