When Metropolis premiered in Berlin in 1927, no one had seen anything like it. For Baltimoreans, the same is true today. The movie spills over with wonders, like a sci-fi horn of plenty - and in the restored version opening today for a week's run at the Senator, for the first time all the marvels fall into place.
Pauline Kael rightly noted that H.G. Wells called it "quite the silliest movie." Yet director-designer William Cameron Menzies must have looked at it before shooting Wells' Things to Come. George Lucas and Ridley Scott borrowed from it for Attack of the Clones and Blade Runner (among others), and so did John Huston for the Tower of Babel sequence in The Bible. James Whale's laboratories in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein gave off the same whiff of retro-futuristic medievalism as the lair of Lang's mad scientist Rotwang, and Rotwang himself was reborn as the title character of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
Every contemporary disaster movie owes something to Lang's rampaging flood scenes. And the movie's strain of apocalyptic religious imagery - including the Grim Reaper and embodiments of the Seven Deadly Sins - might have lodged in Ingmar Bergman's memory long before he made The Seventh Seal.
The original English-language release prints of Metropolis were versions from Hell - or, I should say, Hel. Distributors bet that Brits and Yanks wouldn't understand that Hel was a German female name, and thus excised a key character from the picture, eliminating the reason for the antagonism between master builder Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel), the creator of the dream city Metropolis, and Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), the inventor of a mechanical woman who almost brings it down.
Brain, hands, heart
In this 75th-anniversary digital restoration, painstakingly put together from the best original materials, we learn that Joh and Rotwang once vied for a beauty named Hel, who married Joh and died giving birth to his son Freder (Gustav Frohlich). Rotwang then constructed a nubile robot to assuage his grief and lost one of his own hands in the process.
When the action in Metropolis starts, and Joh orders Rotwang to give this robot the face of a woman called Maria (Brigitte Helm) - an idealist Joh wants to discredit - Rotwang seizes the opportunity to wreak mammoth vengeance.
