TCM just showed a very good print/copy of this silent classic. It is really a great movie…even if silent. Lang really showed the future…and managed to make an interesting story. I have a few questions:
-that evil Rotwang guy-was he supposed to be the Devil?
-Fredreson Sr.-the master of Metropolis-was he inherently evil?
-the “proles”-why was so uch labor still being done manually in Metropolis? I mean , everything was automated
-Rotwang’s house (" a queer little house, forgotten by the centuries"-what was the symbolism?
Another observation: the hero (Frederson’s son)looks a lot like Leo DiCaprio!
What a funny coincidence! I just rented this movie from Netflix and watched it last night! However, I’m not sure I can answer your questions because… um… I’m not very bright? I’ll give it a shot, though:
-that evil Rotwang guy-was he supposed to be the Devil?
No, I think you’re being too literal. It’s obvious he wasn’t a good guy, but I don’t think he was the Devil. He just resented Fredersen for taking his beloved Hel and “killing” her (since she died in childbirth with Freder), so he got his revenge by causing the downfall of Fredersen’s Metropolis. While there was some Christian allegory, I don’t think Rotwang was meant to be Satan.
-Fredreson Sr.-the master of Metropolis-was he inherently evil?
Hmm. That’s a hard question. Were the robber barons of the 19th century evil? Were the Union busters during the Great Depression evil? Is Wal-Mart evil? What about Kenny-boy Lay? Tyco? Halliburton??? Are people who get rich exploiting their workers and the environment evil? Or is that just good capitalism? Don’t ask me, I barely graduated high school. 
He was as evil as anyone else who gets off the blood, sweat, and tears of others.
-the “proles”-why was so uch labor still being done manually in Metropolis? I mean , everything was automated
Well… I think that may have been because of the era the film was made. The assembly line was invented a scant 14 years earlier; I’m not sure how “fully automated” someone of that era would be able to envision the future. Surely there had to be someone behind the scenes pulling levers and cranking um… cranks, right? That’s my wag, anyway, I’m probably just full of it.
-Rotwang’s house (" a queer little house, forgotten by the centuries"-what was the symbolism?
No idea. Probably just what it was, a queer little house, forgotten by the centuries, where a madman could create his fantastic devices and worship his dead girlfriend undisturbed.
Frankly, the thing that had me scratching my head is why Fredersen would go to Rotwang for help in the first place. He had to know the whole Hel-stealing thing would have left some sore feelings! “Sorry I took the only woman you loved and killed her by impregnating her with my kid with the big giant head, but hey, funny story, my kid’s in trouble now, could you lend me a hand?”
He was as evil as anyone else who gets off the blood, sweat, and tears of others.
:o
I meant, gets rich off the blood, sweat, etc.
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Abort, retry, fail?
Yes, Metropolis is good. But Fritz Lang did much better.
Try any of these films.
-the “proles”-why was so uch labor still being done manually in Metropolis? I mean , everything was automated
Remember when Fredersen Jr. takes over for that one worker, moving the two hands on that big dial to match where the lights are turned on? If there is any job more utterly pointless than that, I haven’t seen it. The proles weren’t workers in a non-automated society, the proles were automation.
And it is a great movie. They did a newly restored version of it in the last few years. I don’t know how many times that movie has been distributed, edited and copied, but the restorers got every inch of film from every source they could find, cleaned it all up and recorded a new score from the original sheet music. I don’t know if that’s the version TCM showed or not.
I was at the film museum in Berlin about a month ago, and they have some things from Metropolis; an inviation and program from it’s world premiere, and a robot Maria (although I suspect that’s a copy).
C’mon, he’s a mad scientist. He has to have a proper lair. Like a brightly lit penthouse would have been better? 
And Rotwang wasn’t the devil himself, but he was probably toying with alchemy, and/or “sold his soul to the devil”—symbolically, at least. He’d driven himself to the brink of madness to “tamper in god’s domain,” to bring back his love as a soulless* machine. That’s why you have all the pentagrams and whatnot all over his lab.
*Though that’s probably being unfair to the Maria-Robot. She was evil, but she didn’t seem like just a mindless automaton. But I guess by some definitions, “no soul” means “evil,” no matter how self-aware or intelligent the soulless being is.
Oddly enough, this wouldn’t be the last time Brigitte Helm would play an evil, “soulless” woman.
This was, indeed, before a lot of automation was developed. Remember, in the 19th century, even with steam and water power and machines, most assembly was still done by hand labor. And if you’v got cheap hand labor, there’s not much incentive for pursuing automation. At times in history “pointless” labor has been seen as a good way to employ lots of people and keep them out of trouble, or whatever.
By the way – as I’ve noted before onthis Board, following hands around, as that worker was doing, wasn’t pointless at all at that time. In Cecil Scott orester’s novel The Ship (set about 15 years after Metropolis was made) the gunnery stations on a warship still had something like that – men sat or stood t stations following the motion of indicaors for wind velocity and direction. This “fed” the information into mechanical targeting “computers”. It just wasn’t possible to have the telltales connected directly in. So, yeah, they really did have situations like that.
Besides, it gave Lang a priceless image of a man toiling at what was, in effect, a clock. (Did you notice that the clocks have ten hours? And that they apparently correspond o a work shift?)
I hope they broadcast the recently restored version. If not, see if you can get hold of it. The print quality is superb, and they have anaged to restore as much of the film as they could.
y the way, AFAIK, Rotwang was the first real “mad scentist” in film history. There were other scientists (as in the 1910 Edison “Frankenstein”). but Rotwang in “Metropolis” provides the archetype, with his lab full of equipment, blinking lights and electrical discharges (and fluids and lots of bubbles). He also had a dwarf assistant who is, I strongly suspect, the inspiraton behind the assistant “Fritz” in James Whale’s “Frankenstein”, who ultimately became the “Igor” of pop culture when subsequent Universal films inevitably featured a twisted or hunchbaked assistant.
Metropolis is a great movie. I’m not a film historian, but the power and influence of Metropolis on filmmaking is remarkably clear. Planes flying through towering, futuristic skyscrapers? Hollywood still uses Lang’s imagery when it wants to evoke The Future.
Although the surface layer of class struggle is overwrought and, to me, more than a little dull (I mean, really, how many times do we need to be reminded that the head and the hands need a mediator?), the movie’s got some real good stuff going for it, including an interesting amalgam of different cultural traditions meshed into the story.
Rotwang is a ostensibly a “scientist”, but Lang plucked him straight out of German literature’s Faustian tradition, which reveals both a fascination with and a terror of the darker arts. The movie takes place in The Future, but it draws a clear parallel between the bizarre technology you see and the arcane arts of the past, which is especially interesting considering that the movie predates Arthur C. Clarke’s law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
You can tell by the movie’s portrayal of Rotwang (his clothes, his house, his manner, etc.) that he is not a scientist, but a magician. He offers the world great power, but this power could come with a great price. While I would not call him an actual devil, he certainly represents the Mephitopheles side of the bargain. His technology has built the city, but they trust him at their risk.
An interesting comparison is our current popular conception of the scientist, who might go “mad” mixing different colored liquids while surrounded by various electical gizmos. People are uncomfortable with what they don’t understand, and this discomfort has manifested in various ways throughout history. Rotwang is interesting because he’s the fulcrum, the turning point from the old conception to the new one.
Frederson Sr. is likewise a morally tainted character, but I believe the movie makes clear that he is not “inherently evil”. He certainly plays an oppressive role, but the repeated statement of the movie is that he is simply misguided, that is, he lacks the “heart” to make the right decisions. Given the proper motivating force, it seems clear that he can do good deeds by working together with the hands, which are the workers.
These workers suffer from the technologically-driven society that Frederson Sr. has made, and this technology is not automated. It looks like it should be, but that’s because you’re looking at it after-the-fact. You’ve been exposed to images of high-tech stuff all your life, so you realize that it would be silly to have people do those tasks in real life. Lang didn’t have the same advantage. He wanted to portray the dehumanizing effect these machines were having, and he made due with what he had. His depiction has obviously not stood the test of time, but I think it’s important to remember why.
The film’s moral message falls short, I think, but it’s still an amazing work. I’m glad you liked it, and I hope this post helps to clear up your questions.
By the way…for fun, you might try the version of Metropolis redone in the 80s by Giorgio Moroder.
It’s been out of print for years, but you might find it at a video store or a library. It’s an experience.
It is with great pain and regret that I must point out a boo-boo here. There was, so far as I could see, no dwarf assistant. See, I include a qualifier, in case it turns out there was a dwarf and I didn’t see him, but I didn’t see a dwarf. Sorry 
Oh, that’s it, on the nose! Evidently I need to be reminded multiple times–I wish I had made that post!
All in all I thought it was a good Union propaganda film. 
I apologize for repeating any answers. I hit submit too soon.
Good-day to you, sir.
I said, good-day.
That’s what you get for blinking.
He’s not in for very long – just a single shot, although I’ll bet he was in more of the film before it got butchered an a lot of it lost.
He doesn’t appear in any of the laboratory scenes. He just comes in to tell Rotwang that Feder, the Master of Metropolis has arrived.
Gotta agree with Ranchoth about the Moroder version – but I have to point out that it’s not “redone” – it’s a really good print (far better than the awful Amercan prints that I’d seen before it), combined with some previously "lost"fotage and some scenes “recreated” from stills, all f it provided with a rock score. I loved it. It was the first time I saw that the original title was animated, and it bew me away. The print was crystal-clear (or so I thought – the new restoration is even better), and saw details that I’d never seen before. Plus the stotry made sense, for the first time.
A lot of people loved the restoration, but hated the music. Some theaters showed it with a different score. I have to say that, tasteless person that I am, I love the score, and even have a tape of the music. I also have the film on VHS.
If you want a really weird take on Metropolis, look up the DC comic Superman’s Metropolis. It retells the Superman story, identfying characters with those in Metropolis. Lex Luthor is Rotwang (caled Lu-Tor), Clark is Joh Frederson, Lois is Maria, Lana Lang is one of the girls in the pleasure arden. Perry White is the chief engineer (the guy with the Big Beard in the film). And the Daily Planet building, with the damned weird globe on the top, fits *perfectly[/i with the rest of Lang’s FutureWeird Metropolis.
Ironically, Gustav Fröhlich, who played “the heart” that joins the hand and the head, served in the Wehrmacht during WWII.
You’re right there was a dwarf. I typed too hastily.
I am also struck by how closely METROPOLIS (the city) seemed to inspire the GM pavilion at the 1939 NYC World’s Fair (see if you can rent the movie called “THE WORLD OF TOMORROW”). It’s amazing how GM’s engineers came up with something that so closely resembled Lang’s vision of the future!
Damn! I wish OUR cities looked like this! Zeppelins docking on skyscrapers…man, what a sight!
In some ways, the people of the Art Deco era (1920-40) were much more modern in their outlook than us…I’m living in a suburb where people build replicas of 16th-century houses (complete with anachronisms like fireplaces), and think its great!
GIVE ME one of those glass-and-steel Mies Van Der Rohe houses of the 1920’s any day!
Well, the class struggle thing probably makes more sense in the light that the 1920’s was the time of the original “Red Scare” and the idea of a worker revolt was not so far fetched, particulary when labor unions were seen as the forfront of this, or so is the impression I’ve gotten, I’m not expert.
But I personally don’t remember the tower of babel story having anything to do with class struggle, not that it isn’t a really cool sequence.
There’s also the religious understone that prevades the whole scruture, with Fredier being very much a christ figure, it seems, except without his own sacrifice.
And the Anime re-interpetation, which is visually brilliant, & assesses robots through the lens of an extra century of so of technology.
CLICK HERE
Very cool.