Tomorrowland

Tomorrowland

by Chris Dashiell

After 75 years of being shown in various truncated
versions, and in the process making an incalculable
impact on science fiction, and on popular culture in
general, Fritz Lang's Metropolis has finally been
released in a gorgeous new print, with about 80% of
the original 150-minute film restored by Kino
International. When it played on the big screen in my
town recently, I felt (despite having watched it dozens
of times in various shoddy video incarnations) that I
was seeing this extraordinary film for the first time.

Coming off the major triumph of Die Nibelungen, a lavish adaptation of the great German epic poem of the same name, Lang decided to top himself with an ambitious science fiction film about a future society in which the elite live in luxury above ground, while the workers toil in unrelieved misery beneath the earth. This dystopia is run by a grim capitalist autocrat named Fredersen (Alfred Abel). His son Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) spends his time in a hedonistic frolic, until he encounters Maria, a beautiful prophet (Brigitte Helm) who preaches a message of love and hope to the workers at night, and inspires Freder to investigate their brutal working conditions. Meanwhile, his father gets wind of Maria's influence through the evil scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), who -- in revenge for Fredersen's stealing the love of his life, Freder's deceased mother -- invents a robot that will impersonate Maria in order to lead the workers to a destructive revolt.

The weirdly complicated story (from Lang's wife Thea von Harbou) doesn't withstand serious scrutiny. But this is a case where the visual style and production design is so far ahead of the creaky plot mechanisms that we must simply feast our eyes without troubling our heads too much over the script. Lang creates a universe of monumental art deco towers and offices, connected by a maze of elevated roadways (with biplanes flying underneath them), and a subterranean world of gigantic machines serviced by drones marching in unison. Using a mirror-like technique devised by Eugen Schufftan, miniatures are seamlessly blended with full-size sets to create a staggering illusion of size and depth. The entire visual effect is overwhelming -- the impression of an artificial totality is so heavy that the film sometimes feels oppressive to watch. Such sequences as Feder's vision of the great machine as a man-eating Moloch, or the merging of the robot with Maria by the mad scientist (endlessly imitated by the later Frankenstein films and their progeny) are stunning in their harshness, unlike the more tamely insinuating simulations of our modern computer-generated effects.

In hindsight, it is obvious that Lang would have been better off cutting the sometimes wordy screenplay, and letting the brilliant design do most of the talking, but this was 1927, and von Harbou's florid style must have seemed powerful at the time. The central idea -- that "the hand and
the brain can only be joined by the heart" -- is fuzzy-minded and insulting, since it takes the social roles of labor and capital at face value as if they were natural dispensations. The film's terrifying spectacle totally belies its naive political notions of transformation through love. If society has gone
this far, something more than a dashing hero and some good will will be necessary to fix it.

Another problem is the unfortunate choice of Fröhlich to play the young hero. He's sappy and unappealing, and his desperate overacting is hard to witness without succumbing to giggles. The 17-year-old Helm is over-the-top as well, but her intensity is more entertaining, especially in the role of the evil robot Maria, where she struts and swaggers and winks like a half-crazed slut. In the role of the uber-capitalist Fredersen, Alfred Abel contributes one of the film's few restrained performances, which is a welcome relief from the hysterical mugging going on around him.

This restored version features the original Gottfried Huppertz score, written for the film's 1927 premiere. It's standard late Romantic fare, but it does the trick. Many of the scenes were longer, containing more details than I had ever seen before. The manic pace of the edited version is somewhat amended by the restoration of these lost scenes and fragments -- the picture gains power with increased length. Kino has also supplied detailed intertitles describing lost scenes. An entire subplot involving Fredersen's assistant Josephat (Theodor Loos), the worker at the bizarre clock-like machine who is relieved by Freder, and the sinister hit man (Fritz Rasp) sent to get them, was cut and completely lost. Other missing scenes help to explain Maria's escape from Rotwang's clutches, but the story's continuity and motivations are still rather tenuous.

The idea that an idealistic leader could both free the workers and reconcile them to their masters seems to inescapably foreshadow similar Nazi delusions (von Harbou stayed behind when her husband fled Germany, and became a loyal follower of Hitler). But like Freud's return of the repressed, the imagery of Metropolis has come to signify the horrors of 20th century totalitarianism, as well as the baleful effect of government-sponsored technology on individual liberty.

The most expensive film ever made in Germany at that time, Metropolis bombed at the box office, and ended up bankrupting UFA, the legendary German studio that had startled the world with expressionistic works by Lang, Murnau, Pabst, and others. But the picture's influence far outlived its initial failure. It's a painfully flawed work -- bombastic, grossly sentimental, bordering on incoherent -- and it's also one of the most astonishing stylistic achievements ever to appear on a screen. Finally I've seen it for what seems like the first time, and it was worth the wait.

As part of this month-long series on early German cinema, my local art house also showed a fascinating rarity: G.W. Pabst's 1931 adaptation of the Brecht-Weill classic The Threepenny Opera.

The play, of course, was an adaptation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, cunningly modernized into an anti-capitalist satire. Pabst and his screenwriters softened and distorted the text, and Brecht promptly slapped the film with a lawsuit, but lost in court. Nevertheless, the film still captures some of the play's jaunty, cynical tone, and sneaks in some social critique as well.

Mack the Knife (Rudolf Forster), chief of a turn-of-the-century London criminal gang, seduces and marries Polly Peachum (Carola Neher), earning the enmity of the King of Beggars (Fritz Rasp) who plots with the police chief to catch Mack and have him executed. Neher is very charming and a good singer. Forster is in fine voice too, but he struck me as rather too old for the part. The film also features our only filmed glimpse of the younger Lotte Lenya, who is great in the role of the prostitute Jenny.

Filmed entirely in the studio, the picture sports a dark, smoky visual style. Pabst's mastery of the moving camera, and his talent for choosing interesting ways of shooting a scene, including daringly oblique angles and inventive use of the long shot, makes the film a delight for the eyes. On the other hand, the dialogue and pacing seem to lag behind the visuals at times. Part of this might be due to the still-primitive state of sound film in Germany, with everything being recorded on set, sans post-dubbing. But I think the movie is also handicapped by the familiar problem of adapting from stage to film. The script is too stagey and set-bound, which works against Pabst's cinematic methods.

The Threepenny Opera ended up being banned by the Nazis when they came to power in '33. Even toned down from the original play, the film, with its depiction of criminals who are practically indistinguishable from the authorities, was obviously a barbed satire of German society. Today it seems rather tentative and awkward -- not nearly as impressive as Pabst's other great sound films, Westfront 1918 and Kameradschaft -- but it's still an intriguing and visually arresting piece of work.

The scary part is that, if you take away the period detail and the Weimar nightclub atmosphere, the film could just as well be talking about the U.S. today. We can laugh when the thieves decide to take over the banking business, but that's not really so far from our actual situation. This, my friends, is what is known as a sobering thought.