Metropolis movie review & film summary (1927)

Much of what we see in “Metropolis” doesn't exist except in visual trickery. The special effects were the work of Eugene Schuefftan, who later worked in Hollywood as the cinematographer of “Lilith” and “The Hustler.” According to Magill's Survey of Cinema, his photographic system “allowed people and miniature sets to be combined in a single shot, through the use of mirrors, rather than laboratory work.” Other effects were created in the camera by cinematographer Karl Freund.

The result was astonishing for its time. Without all of the digital tricks of today, “Metropolis” fills the imagination. Today the effects look like effects, but that's their appeal. Looking at the original “King Kong” not long ago, I found that its effects, primitive by modern standards, gained a certain weird effectiveness. Because they looked strange and unworldly compared to the slick, utterly convincing effects that are now possible, they were more evocative: The effects in movies like “Jurassic Park” and “Titanic” are done so well, by comparison, that we simply think we are looking at real things, which is not quite the same kind of fun.

“Metropolis” has not existed for years in the version that Lang completed. It was chopped by distributors, censors and exhibitors, key footage was lost, and only by referring to the novelization of the story by Thea vonHarbou can various story gaps be explained. In 1984 a reconstructed version was released, adding footage gathered from Germany and Australia to existing prints, and that version, produced by Giorgio Moroder, was color tinted “according to Lang's original intentions” and given an MTV-style musical score. This is the version most often seen today.

Purists quite reasonably object to it, but one can turn off the sound and dial down the color to create a silent black-and-white print. I am not crazy about the soundtrack, but in watching the Moroder version I enjoyed the tinting and felt that Lang's vision was so powerful it swept aside the quibbles: It's better to see this well-restored print with all the available footage than to stand entirely on principle.

“Metropolis” does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world. The ideas of “Metropolis” have been so often absorbed into popular culture that its horrific future city is almost a given (when Albert Brooks dared to create an alternative utopian future in 1991 with “Defending Your Life,” it seemed wrong, somehow, without Satanic urban hellscapes). Lang filmed for nearly a year, driven by obsession, often cruel to his colleagues, a perfectionist madman, and the result is one of those seminal films without which the others cannot be fully appreciated.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46gqZ6ZpGK6sMLInmSmnaSnvLG7y6KqZmlpZ4Q%3D