A Restored German Classic of Futuristic Angst
 
July 12, 2002
By A. O. SCOTT

 
On Jan. 10, 1927, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," a wildly ambitious, hugely
expensive science fiction allegory of filial revolt, romantic love,
alienated labor and dehumanizing technology opened at the Ufa Palast
theater in Berlin. Lang's film, of course, went on to become one of the
touchstones of 20th-century cinema, exhaustively studied and endlessly
imitated, but apart from its brief theatrical run in Berlin and Nuremberg
75 years ago, the movie as Lang made it has never really been seen.

 
What happened to "Metropolis" is, in some ways, a familiar movie-industry
story of a studio's interference with an artist's work. (Or, if you prefer
to side with the studios, of a filmmaker's profligate indifference to
economic necessity and audience response.) A few weeks after the premiere,
Ufa, the studio that had produced the film, pulled it from theaters and
cut out 7 of the original 12 reels.

 
Paramount, the American distributor, went even further, engaging a
playwright, Channing Pollock, to compose English title cards and to
reshape the story to fit his own tastes. "I have given it my meaning,"
Pollock boasted. Lang was so appalled that he swore he would never go to
the United States, a vow he broke a few years later, when Hitler proved to
be a much graver threat to his art (to say nothing of his life) than
Hollywood could ever be.

 
Much of the grandeur and strangeness of "Metropolis" survived Paramount's
butchery and the further desecration perpetrated in 1984 by Giorgio
Moroder, who added color tints to Karl Freund's eerie Expressionist
black-and-white cinematography and replaced Gottfried Huppertz's lush,
Wagnerian score with the music of pop stars like Freddy Mercury and Bonnie
Tyler.

 
Had Lang lived to see the age of the "director's cut" DVD, he might have
responded to those transgressions and reconstructed a definitive
"Metropolis." But now we have something nearly as good. Thanks to four
years of painstaking work by Martin Koerber, a German film
preservationist, and Alpha-Omega, a Munich company specializing in digital
restoration, there is now, at long last, a "Metropolis" with a legitimate
claim to being definitive.

 
Film Forum on Houston Street may lack the decadent Weimar glamour of the
Ufa Palast, but it does serve the best movie house popcorn in Manhattan
and, for the next two weeks, will be showing the latest version of
"Metropolis" in a spotless 35-millimeter print with a new recording of
Huppertz's score.

 
Much has been retrieved — more than 1,300 feet of film have been added
since the last rerelease, in 1987 — and the English titles have been
translated anew. There is also a second set of title cards, printed in a
plainer font, without multiple exclamation points, to indicate scenes that
are still missing. A subplot involving a character called the Thin Man, a
mysterious monk and visions inspired by the Book of Revelation remains
tantalizingly sketchy, but Lang's visual audacity and thematic ambition
are breathtakingly apparent, as is his astonishing sense of scale, which
enabled him to swoop from terrifying sublimity to piercing, quiet intimacy
with a single cut.

 
Pollock complained that, in Lang's version, "symbolism ran such riot that
people who saw it couldn't tell what the picture was all about." He was
not altogether wrong: Christianity, German romanticism, modernism and
Marxism stampede through the movie like the crowds of angry workers and
bourgeois revelers in the apocalyptic climax, but the confusion that
results ultimately resolves into hallucinatory, visionary clarity. Only by
pushing himself to the very edge of coherence was Lang able to transcend
the schematic moralizing that keeps so much science fiction tethered,
ultimately, to the mundane.

 
This is not to slight either the emotional impact or the political
resonance of Lang's fever-dream of the future. Quite the contrary:
"Metropolis" retains its power to overwhelm, trouble and move because it
is connected to the deep anxieties of modern life as if by a high-voltage
cable. The story of the scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), a modern
Pygmalion designing a female robot to replace his lost love, stands
between "Frankenstein" and "A.I." as an expression of the defining modern
preoccupation with machines that blur the boundary between the human and
the mechanical.

 
The early scene of workers trudging into the dark maw of their underground
factory has been copied to death (most recently in "Road to Perdition"),
but it remains unsurpassed as an image of how mechanized work for
another's profit can strip people of their individuality. Later, as the
mob of workers smashes the factory and unleashes a flood of anarchy on the
city, we see an equally chilling image of the senseless destruction that
revolt against exploitation can produce.

 
In 1927, "Metropolis" was attacked by the German left as implicitly
fascistic, and by the right for its Communist tendencies. But one of the
curiosities of the film is that its aesthetic extremity serves a mild and
moderate ideology. The city, run by the suave industrialist Joh Fredersen,
is a drastically polarized place, with lush gardens and soaring
skyscrapers above ground and infernal slums below.

 
In the depths, a young woman, Maria (Brigitte Helm, the Kirsten Dunst of
the Weimar Republic), prophesies the coming of a messianic figure called
the Mediator, whose name sums up the temperate, reformist message buried
in the movie's sweep and bombast. The Mediator turns out to be Freder
Fredersen (Gustav Fröhlich), the boss's sensitive son, whose infatuation
with Maria leads him to a moral awakening.

 
His ultimate triumph is delayed by obstacles and digressions too numerous
and wonderful for mere prose, and the audience is distracted from the
film's moral by its elements of horror, mystery, burlesque and romance.
Far from a historical curio, "Metropolis" arrives, three-quarters of a
century late, like an artifact from the future. At last we have the movie
every would-be cinematic visionary has been trying to make since 1927.
"Metropolis" opens today at the Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, South
Village. Tickets: $9.75; $5 for members and 65+ weekdays before 5 p.m. Box
office: (212) 727-8110.
 
 
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