F r i t z L a n g 's ( 1 8 9 0 - 1 9 7 6 )

M E T R O P O L I S

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Born in Vienna, Fritz Lang was a college dropout who served as an artillery officer in World War I and was wounded at least three times. He visited New York in 1924 to promote Die Niebelungen and was so impressed by the skyscrapers, then an exclusively North American architecture, he developed the idea of setting a feature film in a city of the future. Metropolis was one of the very first science fiction films. His wife and collaborator, Thea von Harbou (1888-1954) coauthored the screenplay.

The incredible special effects cinematography of Metropolis influenced such films as Blade Runner and was due to the master cinematographers Eugen Schüfftan (1893-1977), Karl Freund, and Günther Rittau. The Schüfftan (or Shueftan) process was first used in Metropolis, combining live action with models in one shot with mirrors. Schüfftan process shots were generally cleaner and more convincing than the rear-projection and traveling matte shots which replaced them, and are sometimes superior to modern computer generated imaging (CGI). Metropolis was not initially a critical success, and nearly bankrupted UFA (Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft), the largest film studio in Germany. Filmed over almost two years from 1925-26, the film cost 5.3 million marks ($ 7 million in 1926 dollars, but about $ 200 million 2003 dollars), and was the most expensive film made in Europe up to that time. Supposedly Metropolis used 37,633 performers, with one thousand extras with shaved heads appearing in the Tower of Babel sequence, multiplied by six through special effects.

A seriously cut version, forty percent shorter than the director's cut, was exhibited in the United States, with new English subtitles. The shorter version loses the original three-act/two-intermission format of the director's cut and makes some parts of the convoluted plot incomprehensible. The fact that Joh Frederson and Rotwang had been romantic rivals, and that Maria resembles the lost object of their affection was completely deleted, because Paramount executives thought the dead woman's name Hel, a shortened form of Helga, would provoke laughs from an American audience. Different versions were produced and edited for different markets, and many sequences from the director's cut seem to have been lost. The film that remains, remains visually stunning, even if the bizarre plot is often campy. The reference to "Parufamet" in the opening credits refers to the ad hoc partnership of Paramount, UFA, and MGM which distributed Metropolis in the U.S.

Prior to Metropolis, Lang had directed the Dr. Mabuse series of films, about a manipulative master criminal, and the epic Die Niebelungen (1924) consisting of Siegfried and Kriemhilde, based on Nordic mythology. Lang went on to make Die Frau im Mond (Girl on the Moon) for UFA in 1929, another science fiction extravaganza which introduced the launch countdown. Caught in the transition from silent to sound films, it was even less financially successful than Metropolis. German rocket expert Herman Oberth (1894-1989), who helped design the V1 robot bomb and the V2 and A4 rockets, served as technical advisor, designing rockets and other equipment for this film. Lang's first sound film was M (1931), a shocking story in which Peter Lorre plays a serial killer.

Lang, whose mother was Jewish, left Germany in 1933 and went to Hollywood after making Lilliom (1934) in France. Thea von Harbou divorced him and remarried Rudolf Klein-Rogge (Rotwang), whom she had divorced to marry Lang, and together she and Klein-Rogge made propaganda films for the Nazis. In the U.S., Lang was nearly blacklisted in the fifties because of his association with Bertolt Brecht and other communists. His American films include Fury (1936), Western Union (1941) with Robert Young and Randolph Scott, Hangmen Also Die (1942) about the assassination of Nazi Reynhard Heydrich, the military governor of Czechoslovakia, The Ministry of Fear (1944) with Ray Milland, Rancho Notorious (1952) with the incomparable Marlene Dietrich, like Lang a German who despised fascism, and the classic film noir The Big Heat (1953) from the novel by Raymond Chandler.

Cinematographer Karl Freund (1890-1969) went to Hollywood and photographed many important films, including Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi, The Mummy (1932) with Boris Karloff, Mad Love (1935) with Peter Lorre and Colin Clive, and Key Largo (1948) with Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Edward G. Robinson. He won the Academy Award for best cinematography for The Good Earth (1937) from the novel by Pearl S. Buck. He directed or photographed over 500 films. In the fifties he photographed I Love Lucy for television.

Set designer Edgar G. Ulmer (1904-) emigrated to the U.S. and continued to work as a set and production designer, but also directed The Black Cat (1934) with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, and many well-regarded though rather inexpensive horror and science fiction films, including The Man from Planet X (1951). He had designed the sets for the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Fritz Lang's M (1931). He also directed for television through the sixties. Special effects cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan became a director and production designer in Hollywood, and received the Academy Award for cinematography for The Hustler (1961).

The Cast

Brigitte Helm (1908-1996) (Maria and the Robot Maria) was born Brigitte Eva Gisela Schittenhelm and made her screen debut in Metropolis. Incredibly, she was only seventeen. She went on to star in Alralune (1928) and Queen of Atlantis (1932) but her screen career effectively ended when she left Germany to escape the Nazi regime in 1935.

Gustav Froelich (1902-1987) (Freder Frederson) debuted as Franz List in Paganini (1922). Thea von Harbeau saw him as an extra on the set of Metropolis and chose him to play Freder based on his good looks. Always a popular star in Germany, he became a director, making German versions of Warner Brothers films. Between his two marriages, his mistress left him to marry Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (no accounting for taste there). He served in the Wehrmacht during World War II.

Alfred Abel (1879-1937) (Joh Frederson, master of Metropolis) worked many odd jobs before World War I, including as a forester, a bank teller, and a designer, before going into show business in 1913. He starred in many early German films including Lang's Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922). He directed three films in the thirties.

Rudolf Klein-Rogge (1888-1955) (Rotwang) was an accomplished stage actor before making his screen debut in 1919. His hammy, over-the-top style displays well in silent films and is nowhere more evident than in Metropolis. He appeared in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), one of the most important silent horror films. He also played the title role in Lang's Dr. Mabuse series, the mythical King Etzel in Die Niebelungen (1924), and the criminal mastermind Haghi in Lang's Spionen (Spies) (1928). He was married to Thea von Harbou twice, both before and after Lang, and supposedly converted her to Nazism. Harbou and Klein-Rogge collaborated on several costume dramas under the Nazi regime, but Klein-Rogge somehow earned the disfavor of Joseph Goebbels, an occupational hazard under fascism, and had to retire from acting by 1942. He was unable to resume a successful career after the war.

Metropolis was written by Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou. Harbou also produced a popular novel based on the screenplay. Metropolis was photographed by Karl Freund and Günther Rittau. Edgar G. Ulmer designed the sets. Art direction was by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht. Aenne Willkomm designed the costumes, including the Robot Maria. Eugen Schüfftan designed and executed the special effects cinematography. Gottfried Hupperts composed original music for the film, intended to be performed live whenever the film was exhibited. Metropolis was produced for UFA by Erich Pommer.

Plot Synopsis

Metropolis is a generic urban and industrial society of the unnamed and unspecified future. Everyone in this society is dwarfed by the buildings and machines which make up the city. Metropolis's fantastic skyscrapers tower over a foundation of power generators and other machines buried deep in the earth, where masses of dehumanized laborers are worked to death. At the top of the largest building in the city is the office of Joh Frederson (Alfred Abel), the master of metropolis. It is never made clear if Freder is head of the government or so wealthy he is a government unto himself.

Frederson's son Freder (Gustav Froehlich), is an athletic member of the privileged class who compete and frolic in gigantic stadia and pleasure palaces. He is flirting with a privileged girlfriend in the garden of a pleasure palace when Maria (Brigitte Helm) leads a group of workers' children up from the underground city. Frederson falls in love with Maria and follows her to the workers' underground city. There he sees an exhausted worker fall behind in operating a machine. The weakened worker collapses, causing an immense generator to explode, killing many workers. In an hallucination, the generator becomes the pagan god Moloch, to whom the workers' lives are sacrificed.

Freder returns to the overworld and visits his father's office, hoping to plead for better treatment for the workers. His father is unwilling to listen, and fires his secretary Josephat when the workers' foreman Groh reports the workers are holding secret meetings. After preventing Josephat from committing suicide, Freder returns to the workers' underworld, but his father has him followed by a detective. Freder joins a work shift and relives an exhausted worker operating a giant dial. Although Freder is young, vigorous, and athletic, the last ounce of his stamina is drained before he is relieved at the end of his shift. He is able to prevent another explosion, but unused to physical labor, he is utterly worn out by the experience. Freder trades identity with a worker named Georgy, whom he sends to the overworld with a message to Josephat. Georgy is sidetracked by the allure of the highly sensual nightclub district Yoshiwara, and never delivers the message.

In a crooked old house between the upper and underworlds lives scientist-inventor-wizard Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), the father of all screen mad scientists. He had loved Freder's mother Hel, who married Joh Frederson instead. She died giving birth to Freder. Rotwang never got over Hel and keeps a weird shrine to her in his house. Joh visits to see if Rotwang can decipher a map of the workers' catacombs provided by Groh. Before they can go spy on the workers, Rotwang reveals his new invention, a glittering, metallic, female robot he has created to replace Hel.

Back in the underworld, Freder attends a workers' meeting, on which Joh Frederson and Rotwang spy. Maria delivers a sermon on the need for brotherly love and a peaceful solution to oppression of the workers. She likens the workers who built and operate Metropolis to the slaves who built the Tower of Babel. The concentration camp character of these scenes is disturbing and prophetic. Her interpretation is that the tower was a futile endeavor because the slaves who built the tower to the heavens were never asked to share the dreams of their masters. Thus the Tower of Babel, and the city of Metropolis, are equally meaningless entities. She concludes her sermon by calling for the heart to mediate between the mind (management) and the hands that build the dreams of the mind (labor).

From their secret hiding place, Joh and Rotwang decide to replace Maria with the robot. With the Robot Maria controlling the workers, Joh will not have to worry about a revolution. The fact that she is not preaching violence is completely lost on Frederson. He apparently wants to control the workers almost as a reflex, merely for the sake of control. Rotwang kidnaps Maria and uses her to transform the robot into an exact – but totally evil – duplicate. Freder is imprisioned when he tries to rescue the real Maria. Rotwang demonstrates the Robot Maria at Yoshiwara, where she performs a lewd and seductive dance. Joh is persuaded the plan will work when the upper-class Metropolites go berserk and start fighting over her. Eventually they start slaughtering one another in senseless duels.

The Robot Maria has not been programmed by Joh Frederson, who, however misguided, wants to control the workers and preserve his city's social order, but by Rotwang, who wants revenge against his romantic rival by destroying the social order. Like all mad scientists, he is, after all, mad. The Robot Maria preaches violence and tells the workers to smash the machines, which will destroy Metropolis. Freder realizes she is not the real Maria, and returns to Rotwang's house to free the real one. As the machines are smashed Metropolis is blacked out and the workers' underground city starts to flood, threatening to drown the workers' children. Maria and Freder descend back into the underworld to try to save the children.

The workers finally realize their living quarters have been destroyed, and believe Maria has purposely murdered their children. The workers capture the demonic Robot Maria and burn her at the stake. Rotwang chases the real Maria. He fights Freder on the roof of the cathedral and falls to his death. In the cathedral, Maria announces Freder (the heart) is the necessary mediator between Joh (the brain) and the workers (the hands).

Metropolis: Themes

There are two basic themes to Metropolis – the Marxian class conflict between labor and management, and the idea that technology is inherently dehumanizing. A secondary theme is control and manipulation, both physical and psychological.

The class conflict is stylized and highly propagandistic. The master of Metropolis is ruthless and unethical, and willing to deceive the workers to keep them under his thumb. He is the very image of a Marxian capitalist, providing the workers nothing but exploitation. He is also a cold, unfeeling character. When he dismisses his secretary Josephat, the man sees no alternative but suicide. Joh Frederson listens to Maria's non-violence sermon with Rotwang, but he does not hear her. It is as if he feels his mission is to oppose whatever the workers are up to, no matter how little it might threaten his world, because he's a manager and that's what managers do. However, in his own mind, Joh Frederson resorts to deception only to preserve the status quo. It is the demented Rotwang who highjacks Frederson's plan and twists it toward violence and destruction. Frederson wants to control the workers; Rotwang wants to destroy the world.

Morally, the workers, though clearly victims, are little better than Frederson. They are passive and docile under the leadership of the virtuous Maria, but as soon as the Robot Maria incites them to violence and destruction, they seem to lack wills of their own, with no power of resistance or even hesitation. They can easily be manipulated by two evil demagogues like Rotwang and the Robot Maria, and when they (mistakenly) realize that their own actions have destroyed their homes and children, they are also quick to take the law into their own hands as they burn the Robot Maria at the stake.

The real Maria and Freder exist on a higher moral plane than either Frederson or the workers. Maria brings Freder up to her level as he learns first about the workers' horrible living conditions, and then of her non-violent and humanitarian solution in the face of such exploitation. At the end of the story, Maria and Freder, have not only saved the workers' children, but they have reconciled labor and management by converting both to Maria's non-violent philosophy. Thus they have saved the future of Metropolis. Saving the children symbolizes the salvation of society's future. Henceforth, the workers will continue to run the machines, but only in return for the opportunity to share in the above-ground city. Metropolis becomes meaningful when the workers are permitted to share the dreams of the builders. Because they are still evil, Rotwang and the Robot Maria cannot share in this final redemption.

Apart from the class-conflict theme, which tends to lack resonance for Americans, technology is presented as inherently flawed. Not necessarily evil, but necessarily dehumanizing, it dehumanizes everyone: the workers who slave in underground factories, the secretary who thinks he has to kill himself because the master of Metropolis fires him, Freder and his privileged friends who are dwarfed by the inhuman scale of everything around them, and especially Joh Frederson, who possesses incredible power, lives in fabulous luxury, but emotionally is the dried out husk of a man. Until the conclusion, Metropolis has no purpose – no one derives any real happiness from this city.

What drives home the theme of bad technology is that the greatest representative of the technological order is Rotwang. His mad scientist house is decorated both with scientific instruments and demonic, pagan, and superstitious designs. His mechanical arm is used to suggest something is lacking from his humanity. His supreme accomplishment is the Robot Maria, and she is even more extravagantly evil than he is.

The control theme is expressed most clearly through the character of Joh Frederson, the master of Metropolis. The ultimate control freak of all time, he replaces Maria with a duplicate so he can control the workers, fires Josephat because he can, and sends a detective to spy on his son. Frederson fears everything he does not control. Metropolis particularly abounds in images of men controlling giant machines, as with the giant dial, but also emphasizes the price of this advanced technology, depicted as dehumanizing and controlling of the workers. Limitations on, and futility of, this obsessive control are demonstrated by the subplot in which Frederson has his son followed by the detective. The detective mistakenly follows Georgy, the worker with whom Freder exchanges identities, and when the detective discovers his error, he hides it from Frederson, fearing for his job. The detective is a harbinger of destruction, as he appears as a clergyman in Freder's dream, preaching on Revelation.

Metropolis: Influence

The scene where the robot is transformed into Maria resembles the operation scenes in James Whale's Frankenstein (1933) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), and clearly influenced every operation scene in every Universal Frankenstein film, and those in various lesser-known Universal, Warner Brothers, and Columbia horror and science-fiction films of the thirties, forties, and fifties.

Charlie Chaplin modeled mechanized factory scenes in Modern Times (1937) after the underground scenes in Metropolis. Chaplin's comically dehumanized worker has trouble keeping up with the speed of the assembly line, much like the workers' difficulty working giant dials in Metropolis. Also, the Chaplin character prevents an upper-class man from drowning himself, similar to the way Freder prevents Josephat's suicide.

Rotwang's appearance, and some of his behavior and hand gestures, inspired the title character in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964), a mad scientist who just happens to be national security advisor, played by Peter Sellers.

In appearance, the robot C3PO in Star Wars (1972) is a male version of the Robot Maria, though he is not remotely evil or sexually alluring, and she is not remotely nerdy. In contrast, R2D2 seems to have been inspired by the non-anthropomorphic robots Huey, Dewey, and Louie, in Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (1971). They were not comic robots, however. The characters of the Star Wars robots are based on two characters in Akira Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress (1958).

In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1984), Los Angeles is even grittier and more nightmarish than Metropolis, but its appearance was inspired by the earlier film. Blade Runner shows a Metropolis more realistically subject to physical decay and overcrowding. Even though everything in the original Metropolis is brand new, the whole atmosphere is drab, oppressive, and inhuman in scale.

Like Metropolis, the climax of Tim Burton's Batman (1989) takes place on the roof of a cathedral. Gotham City in the Batman series is largely modeled on Metropolis. Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985) and Luc Besson's The Fifth Element (1997) also portray futuristic urban landscapes inspired by Metropolis.