Austrian film director Fritz Lang first laid eyes on New York City in 1924, when the Woolworth Building, less than half the size of One World Trade Center, was the world’s tallest structure.
The swarming, frenetic, petri dish he encountered was so overwhelming that he was driven to create a classic of cinema that endures to this day.
New York was, he told French film magazine Cahiers Du Cinema:
“The crucible of the multiple and confused human forces, with blind men scrambling around in the irresistible desire to exploit one another, thus living in perpetual anxiety.”
The result, Metropolis (1927) is a thinly plotted, overlong, cinematically butchered1 sci-fi movie - and yet it’s never felt fresher, and should be watched by every New Yorker.
There are classic movies that can be enjoyed as entertainment, and classic movies that should be enjoyed mainly as historical artifacts. Metropolis is very much the latter.
The plot itself - with its Marxist overtones - is as simplistic as the thinking that Communism could be humanity’s silver bullet.
In short, Freder, the son of the city’s industrialist dictator Johann, discovers the company’s underground sweatshops and falls in love with the beautiful prophetess Maria. She says rulers and workers should unite peacefully, but a scientist kidnaps her to create a lookalike robot to trigger a rebellion. The machines are destroyed, causing fires and floods, and everybody almost dies.
The portrayal of the polar-opposite father and son is gloriously goofy - with the wide-eyed, pantaloon-wearing scion facing off against his tweed-clad, sharp-featured dad.2
But it’s the portrayal of New York City, and the then-pioneering special effects used to do so, that placed the movie in the pantheon of classics.
Lang’s impression of the city after walking the street for hours was utterly visceral:
The buildings seemed to be a vertical veil, very light and scintillating, a luxurious backdrop suspended from the gray sky to dazzle, distract and hypnotize. At night the city gave only the impression of living; it lived as illusions do. I knew that I must make a film of all these impressions."
He reflects the almost unfathomable grandeur of the city using the-then pioneering Schüfftan process - using mirrors to give the illusion that real-life actors were occupying miniature sets.
The centerpiece of the city is the omnipresent Babel New Tower, with heavy Babylonian architectural influences, and outstretched appendages reminiscent of the Chrysler Building’s eagles.
Planes fly low over the streets (reminding me of the ongoing campaign to end tourist helicopter over the city), vehicles shuttle along at speed on elevated expressways, while commercial lighting flashes and cascades like Times Square.
In 2022 an era of burnout, overwhelm, and a reckoning with the value of the rat-race following the Covid era - an outsider’s interpretation of the city’s at-times terrifying energy is surprisingly powerful.
At the time, critics were overwhelmed by the movie’s scale - in different ways.
The New York Times didn’t really like the movie, but exclaimed:
“Nothing like ‘Metropolis’ has been seen on the screen. It, therefore, stands alone, in some respects, as a remarkable achievement.”
Life Magazine grumbled:
“There is altogether too much of Metropolis… too much scenery, too many people, too much plot and too many platitudinous ideas.
There wasn’t ‘too much plot’, though, there was a lack of plot quality.
There was also a plot point that is relevant to today’s political debates. The nub of Communist thinking is that to rebuild, things must first be destroyed.
But in Metropolis, the cathartic destruction of the underground machinery floods the underworld, threatening the lives of everyone.
The leader of the workers, a wild-eyed, wild-haired lummox called Glot, shouts:
“Who told you to attack the machines, you fools? Without them you'll all die!”
Perhaps the most relevant aspect of the movie today is its stirring depiction of inequality. The rich skip around rooftop pleasure gardens - which are more abundant than ever in 2022 as new skyscrapers soar - while the masses toil in windowless drudgery.
Those men and women work under 10-hour clocks, designed to align with the lengths of their grueling shifts, leading Freder - who takes the place of a worker to experience hard labour - to exclaim: “Father - Will ten hours ever end?”
The conclusion suggests that class conflicts can only be resolved by the heart - in this case Freder - mediating between the hands (the working class) and the head (the ruling class).
But we don’t find out how that Gordian knot is unpicked; and it’s hard to see how the situation is amicably resolved. Johann is unlikely to give up the luxury to which he’s become accustomed, and that means keeping the workers in their hell.
It’s a reminder that it’s sci-fi, a slice of fantasy. But it’s so deeply grounded in the reality of living in a metropolis that it packs a powerful punch almost a century on.
The version first shown to New York audiences in 1927 was disjointed and rife with plot holes. The most recent version - restored using 25-minutes of newly discovered footage - is one of the most complete runs to date, but the inferior quality of the additional footage leads to some jarring transitions.
The interior of his industrialist-modernist-art deco office reminded me of my visit to the Necchi Mansion in Milan, built during Italy’s Fascist period.