Metropolis (1927)

The longer review

The story of Metropolis doesn't survive much thought. A rich man's son falls for a saintly worker named Maria, the city's master has an inventor build a robot copy of her to stir up the workers, and everything is settled by a handshake. Lang himself later said he disliked the message. If you watch for the plot, you'll be checking the clock.

Watch it for the city instead. Towers stacked on towers, highways strung between them, biplanes threading the gaps, and far below, the workers marching in shifts like parts of the machines they tend. The effects team, using miniatures and mirror tricks, produced images that have been borrowed for a century, from music videos to science fiction blockbusters.

Then there is Brigitte Helm, in two roles at once. As the real Maria she's gentle and slightly blank. As the robot she's all jerks and leers, a winking, twitching thing that seems to be enjoying the chaos. It's a physical performance with almost nothing to hold onto, and it carries the second half of the film.

The flood that swamps the workers' city is the payoff, a genuinely frightening sequence of water, crowds and children that Lang staged on an enormous scale. It's also where the movie's sentimentality hits hardest. Both things are true at once, which is roughly the experience of Metropolis as a whole.

Before you watch

Look for the 2010 restoration, which put back most of the footage found in Buenos Aires in 2008. It runs about two and a half hours. Older cuts are much shorter and some make the plot even harder to follow.