Movie Review: Metropolis (1927)

To appreciate Fritz Lang's 1927 science fiction masterpiece Metropolis, one must try to not read too deeply into its plot. Though the film speaks in the language, imagery, and music of political allegory, one must approach the film as merely an apolitical fantasy, for any attempt to apply its naive symbolism to the real world will be at best baffling and contradictory and at worst downright offensive. The film's simplified politics scarcely mirror any normal symbolic representation of society as seen from any standard philosophical perspective, neither contemporary society nor, as in 1984, a projection of where society is doomed to be headed.

Co-written by Lang, an anti-fascist of Jewish extraction who was inspired by Soviet literature, and his temporary wife Thea von Harbou, an aristocrat and future member of the Nazi Party, the film's story is an awkward fusing of two magnetically opposed philosophies. Hence, the story depicts the "heads," the thinking elite known as the "upper ten thousand" who live lives of leisure and mindless luxury in magnificent skyscrapers stretching to the heavens, and their "hands," the dirty, shoeless workers who live beneath the earth and keep the machines--and the city above them--running. The beautiful Maria, an odd prophet of the Protestant work ethic and the spirit of capitalism, advocates that the workers keep their noses to the grindstone, earnestly hoping that a "mediator," a "heart," will redeem them. Joh Fredersen, the oligarch in charge of Metropolis, combines forces with Rotwang, a crazed, ugly, dark-featured intellectual who controls the scenes from behind to his own benefit, to build an evil robot version of Maria that incites the workers into a violent, destructive revolution while simultaneously encouraging the upper ten thousand to abandon their virtues to wanton decadence. Society and progress come screeching to a halt, all the children almost die--including Fredersen's own son Freder--and everybody on both sides, after killing the evil Rotwang, realizes that they are all brothers and sisters of one race. They must work together according to their abilities--the animalistic, brutish hands running the machines, the cold but sensible heads controlling the hands--in order to build humanity on a continual, godlike path of progress closer to the stars. On the steps of a cathedral, the hands and the heads are united by Freder--the mediating "heart"--a symbol of compassion and religious faith.

In other words, the status quo is confirmed at the end of the film. The workers should not try to revolt because otherwise they will become homeless and their children will die. Joh Fredersen should remain in power because every society needs a leader with complete authority, and because he has a son that he (sort of) loves, the workers should love him and sympathize with him because they know that he is a human just like them. Rotwang--the sinister intellectual with the crazy dark hair (perhaps he's Jewish?)--is the only villain. And all that the status quo needed to be a perfect society capable of transcending human limitations was a demagogue clothed in religious imagery who just so happens to be the dynastic successor of the current governing elitist. Whatever specific compassion this mediating "heart" will offer is never mentioned (better wages maybe? nine hours of constant, backbreaking work instead of ten?), but his role is likely just propagandistic.

In 1932, Thea von Harbou joined the Nazi Party, and in 1933, the same year that Hitler came to power, the two divorced. In 1934, Lang's film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse was banned in Germany by Joseph Goebbels, who feared that it would undercut the country's faith in ideologues; however, Goebbels, a fan of Metropolis, offered Lang a loaded position as head of a film studio. Fearing that he was being forced to become a fascist propagandist, Lang fled that night to Paris. Two years later he moved to Hollywood, where he lived until his death.

At its center, Metropolis is a fascist film, but Fritz Lang's anti-fascist sentiments are evident in the film's heartfelt depiction of the workers as oppressed individuals, in its ridiculing of the elites as non-consequential fuddy duddies in short pants and combed hairdos, and in its depiction (throughout much of the film, at least) of Joh Fredersen as a heartless, calculating tyrant in love with his own unquestionable power. The film contradicts all this at one point or another, which makes for a perplexing message, but Lang's heart is evident somewhere amongst the soupy mess. Years later in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Lang explained

"The main thesis was Mrs. Von Harbou's, but I am at least 50 percent responsible because I did it. I was not so politically minded in those days as I am now. You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart. I mean, that's a fairy tale — definitely. But I was very interested in machines. Anyway, I didn't like the picture — thought it was silly and stupid — then, when I saw the astronauts: what else are they but part of a machine? It's very hard to talk about pictures— should I say now that I like Metropolis because something I have seen in my imagination comes true, when I detested it after it was finished?"

And that's a key point in the enjoyment of this film. If one can dismiss the plot as merely a fantasy, then one is free to enjoy the visual and technical splendor of the film and all its inspired imagination. The most expensive film ever made at its time, Metropolis features over 38,000 actors and extras, who are used to emphasize the dehumanized role of machine-like workers in a technological future, to illustrate the exhaustion and robotic motions of the oppressed classes, to highlight the anonymity of even the upper classes in a vast and wealthy urban culture, and to add sweeping chaos to climactic scenes of destruction. The disaster scenes of the film's final "furioso" moments, which combine miniature models with actual grand sets, are exhilarating even today. The film, with its starkly black on white nods to German Expressionism, utilizes a variety of meaningful and alluring architectures--the Art Deco skyscrapers and their flashing advertisements; the brutal modernism of the machine district and the workers' underground city; the organic, earthy darkness of the ancient catacombs with their twisting staircases and hidden passages; the intricately detailed Raygun Gothic style of Rotwang's futuristic laboratory; and the larger-than-life, surreal Biblical structures seen in the Tower of Babel and the shrine to Moloch.

Lang's visual compositions are breathtaking, with constant motion in every direction--elevators, trains, airplanes, hoards, falling buildings. Even the camera, in one panicked moment, moves forward to zero in on an important discovery. Some of the special effects will be obvious to today's viewers, but Lang's vision is timeless. Metropolis achieves the utmost levels of movie magic in that its never quite clear what was really filmed and what was mere camera trickery. Given that, it's easy to give up guessing and succumb to the film's imaginative world.

While the acting, particularly that of Gustav Fröhlich as Freder and Rudolf Klein-Rogge as Rotwang, often succumbs to silly silent overacting, Brigitte Helm is notable as both the saintly Maria and the evil robot. With a devilish smile, one constantly winking eyelid, a pivoting head, and gyrating arms, Helm as the Machine Man conveys the terrible possibilities of progress and the dehumanizing nature of rampant technology. She's one of the first notable screen villains, in addition to Fritz Rasp as The Thin Man, a tall, ghastly thug with chiseled features, pointed ears, and strong, slender fingers concealed in black leather gloves. He wears a black outfit resembling both that of an assassin and a monsignor, and his leering face reveals a desperate desire to unleash his destructive power.

Metropolis is full of such captivating details as this holyman assassin. Even the numerals on the film's many bizarre clocks are strange and interesting. Metropolis is a testament to a total style of science fiction filmmaking in which the creation of a good, convincing film requires the creation of an entire new universe full of countless believable yet unreal details. (2001 and Children of Men are further examples of this.) Though the story is baffling and childish, Fritz Lang's complete investment of imagination has guaranteed that the film will always remain a must-see masterpiece.

Metropolis (1927)
d: Fritz Lang w: Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou
(Brigitte Helm, Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel)
TSPDT?: #69
8/10

Movie Review: The Gold Rush (1925)

The proper way to eat a shoe.

The easiest type of movie review to write is one about an awful disaster of a film. Writing such a review taps into the insult comic within us all, and it usually consists of quoting laughable dialogue, pointing out absurd plot consistencies, stringing together insulting hyperbole, and deriding any offensive content.

Next on the scale of easiness is the review about a beloved gem, either a recent film or an obscure older film that the reviewer has seen and loved. The reviewer can still take a sense of ownership over such a film because it has not yet been dissected and devoured. Reviewing such a film is like writing a travelogue about previously unexplored terrain; the reviewer, a trailblazer, feels as though what he says can be treated as authoritative gospel because it's never been said before, and this praise isn't hard to put words to because the reviewer desperately wants to share his new-found love, to figure out what has so moved him.

Somewhat harder is the review of a supposed masterpiece that the reviewer didn't like. These reviews fall into two categories. The critic can either stand firm in resolving that the film is horrible, expressing bafflement that the idiotic masses would be gullible enough to buy into it, or he can throw his hands in the air, earnestly wishing to know what went over his head, what other people saw that he couldn't see, what his own problem is that he's unable to recognize a masterpiece.

But the hardest review of all to write is the review of a classic masterpiece that the critic knows is a masterpiece. What hasn't been said before? How many television documentaries, film studies classes, countdown lists, and scholarly books have already explored every facet of such a film. The critic's words, if he doesn't have some fresh new insight into the film, are repetitive, obvious, and irrelevant.

Charlie Chaplin's iconic comedy The Gold Rush came out eighty-five years ago, and yes, it's hilarious; yes, it's well acted; yes, it's memorable and touching and important and a masterpiece. What can I add to the critical material about this movie?

Perhaps it's best to keep it short and stick to the moments in the film that meant the most to me.

There's a classic scene in this film where Charlie Chaplin boils and eats his own shoe. Chaplin is the Lone Prospector, a silly little tramp braving the elements of the nineteenth century Klondike in search of gold. Caught in a terrible snowstorm, he holes up in an isolated cabin with a wanted criminal named Black Larsen (Tom Murray) and a burly fortune hunter named Big Jim (Mack Swain). When Larsen leaves in search of food, the two prospectors wait and wait, slowly starving. When all the food and the candles and everything else edible is eaten and their stomachs can take it no longer--to the point that Big Jim begins hallucinating that the little tramp is a giant, succulent chicken--the Lone Prospector throws his leather shoe in a pot with snow and boils it for dinner.

This is a very old joke by now, and it was even an old joke and a cliche when the film was made in 1925. What makes it hilarious, though, is how Chaplin goes about eating the shoe. With the shoe on a dinner plate, using a fork and knife, salt and pepper, he carefully removes the shoelaces, cuts apart the heel from the top, removes the cobbler nails and sucks on them, and piles the discarded nails, like bones, on a small dish. He eats the shoe with grace and precision, with nary a hint of desperation. He picks it apart as though it were a fish or a steak, as though there were a traditional method for eating a shoe, with customary rituals and procedures. He follows all the rules of etiquette for the eating of shoes.

The scene was shot using licorice and sugar candy designed to look like a boot. Chaplin, a perfectionist and a diabetic, supposedly shot the scene more than sixty times. By the time he had perfected it, he had suffered from insulin shock and needed to be rushed to the hospital. His suffering paid off, though, the scene is one of the most memorable comedic movie moments of all time.

What also moves me about The Gold Rush is the sad romance between the Lone Prospector and Georgia (Georgia Hale), a beautiful dancer who knows she is beautiful and uses the prospector's shy affections to her own advantage, giving him false hope and making him false promises so that she can make her rivals jealous, make her friends laugh, and make herself feel better. The prospector's childlike persistence in loving her and his naive willingness to be duped make the scenes in which he is humiliated especially sad. Here is a good man with a pure heart who hasn't yet realized that love can be cruel.

What's great about the love story is that his persistent faith in love forces her, if only temporarily, to see the ugliness within herself. She, too, though perhaps only for a moment, remembers that love can be something more than a game. Her transformation is visible, believable, and touching. Of course, her decision to be with him is also coupled with the fact that by the film's end he has become a millionaire. Their love may not be blessed with a happy ending in the years to come, but it is undeniable that the flames of love blaze at the film's end.

Charlie Chaplin is said to have wished that The Gold Rush would be what he was remembered for. With the film as his second highest rated movie on the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of great films (it's #32, with City Lights at #25), he may have got his wish.

The Gold Rush (1925)
d/w: Charlie Chaplin
(Charlie Chaplin, Georgia Hale, Mack Swain)
9/10

Movie Review: Intolerance (1916)

Intolerance has a reputation as being D.W. Griffith's apology for the racist content of The Birth of a Nation, a mea culpa for promoting intolerant ideas and a condemnation of the horrors to which racist ideas lead. I don't know very much about D.W. Griffith or his feelings in the year between the release of this two landmark films, but I think this reputation is largely mistaken. The poorly-titled Intolerance has nothing to do with racism, and except for a few Ethiopians in a battle scene, black people do not even exist in this film. (Nor white people pretending to be black people!)

Intolerance is not an attack on racism but an expose on "intolerance," which according to Merriam-Webster is a concept meaning, "the state of being unable or unwilling to endure." There's a rather large gap between loving or embracing something and "tolerating" it. I don't love standing in a long line on a hot day, but I tolerate it because sometimes I have no other choice. I don't enjoy paying my credit card bills, but I tolerate doing so because otherwise I'll be penalized. I'm not happy that libertarians or arch-conservatives exist, but I tolerate their freedom to think whatever absurdities they want. Because what's the other option? Genocide? Violent outbursts? Lawlessness? Concentration camps? Most sensible people (though certainly not all, I'm afraid) have a pretty good understanding that these reactions aren't sound reactions. Intolerance, I suppose, is aimed at an audience whose natural reaction would be to violently annihilate whomever they disagree with (which happens throughout the film), a rather small demographic of which I am fortunate to not be a member. In all other instances, he's simply preaching to the choir.

Should the North have tolerated slavery? Was the Civil War an unnecessarily bloody act of intolerance? Should we tolerate D.W. Griffith's desire to create a bestselling, historically-inaccurate blockbuster epic that insists segregation is essential? Are people who strike these films being intolerant? Yes, I suppose so.

Intolerance, more accurately and artfully subtitled Love's Struggle Through the Ages, is a three hour and seventeen minute presentation of four thematically linked but otherwise unrelated stories: a Babylonian tale about the fall of Babylon in 539 BCE, a story of the crucifixion of Christ in 27 CE, a depiction of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre by Roman Catholics against Protestant Huguenots in France in 1572, and a modern tale about Americans in 1914 encounter temperance movements, mobsters, and injustice. The inspiration for the film began with only this final story before expanding to include the Babylonian tale, originally conceived to be a separate film. The French and Judean subplots were a later development, a fact made obvious by their limited screen time and underdevelopment. (I haven't actually calculated, but I imagine the French scenes occupy only about twenty or twenty-five minutes of screen time; the scenes about Jesus amount to only a handful of brief scenes and shots.)

The modern story is about a girl-woman who, following the death of her protective father, marries a reformed mobster and has a baby, only to have her life devastated by the intrusions of nosy prohibitionists, a gangland boss, and his jealous, murderous wife. This story--the original story--has the least to do with "intolerance." If you consider that this extremely grandiose film--the most expensive and largest of its time--was released only eighteen months after The Birth of a Nation, the supposition that the latter film is a complete reversal in sentiment and a meaningful, thoughtful apology for the former wears very thin.

And yet, unlike The Birth of a Nation, which is mostly just praised for its technical and narrative innovations and not for its actual thematic content, Intolerance is also exalted for the depth of meaning and earnest emotion that it supposedly contains. To me, the story is just as shoddy, inaccurate, and naive as the earlier film, though the presentation is certainly breathtaking and beautiful, even almost a century later.

D.W. Griffith had the resources to physically build a separate universe. What would be manufactured today using computers and trickery was actually set before the camera. Vast Babylonian walls and idols. Hundreds if not thousands of extras in exotic period dress. Elaborate recreations of ancient religious rites. D.W. Griffith, the only filmmaker of any real renown at the time, needn't have spared any expense at fulfilling his dream, and he clearly didn't. It's stunning to see the output of someone who was the undisputed god of his industry at the time, someone who could make happen whatever he wanted to happen. He wanted one of his actresses to have eyelashes so long that they would brush her cheeks, so he and one of his makeup artists invented false eyelashes. He needed to film an execution scene, so he in collaboration with the department of corrections built an exact replica of a modern gallows. He had the money to hire as many extras as he needed. It's difficult to imagine any filmmaker today being so free of hurdles, and the results are jaw-dropping.

The editing is also amazing, as the four stories cut back and forth, cleverly building upon each other's emotions and energy. As vengeful prohibitionists raid bars and gambling halls, the film recounts Jesus' first miracle, turning water into wine. As a man is sentenced to death, we see struggling to carry his own cross. As a woman races to alert Babylon that they are about to be destroyed by the Persians, a young woman races to intercept a train carrying to governor so that she can beg him for a pardon for her condemned husband. This frantic, energetic, multilayered editing had never been done before, though Eisenstein soon perfected it and now even the simplest television commercials exploit these techniques. The cinematography by G.W. Bitzer is also brilliant, as in the depiction of modern capital punishment, which despite being a violent killing is brightly-lit, sterile, cold, mechanical, and precise. A red-filtered shot of Jesus, far in the background, impossible to be rescued, hanging atop his cross on Calvary as frantic silhouettes mourn in the foreground, their arms writing in the air, is one of the most disturbing and beautiful shots I've ever seen. The extravagant costumes, the make-up, the realistic sets--all are top-notch. Even the special effects are rather shocking and effective, as in one scene when a burly warrior decapitates another on the battlefield.

Perhaps the first stunning mise-en-scène in cinematic history, couple with the most skillful editing of its time. From the unavoidable agony of Christ's crucifixion...

...to the routine, bureaucratic execution of the young husband.

The acting is mostly convincing, though only Mae Marsh as the young bride in the modern story is especially remarkable. Her odd childishness and naivete, on a crash course with a brutal reality check, is genuine and memorable only because of how consistently strange it is.



It's the story, though, so slapdash and ill-informed, that is this otherwise brilliant film's downfall. Consider the historical gaps. Griffith depicts Babylonia as an exotic utopia obsessed with romance and in awe of Ishtar, its goddess of love. Enter the Persians, led by the brutal, war-mongering, intolerant Cyrus the Great, who, according to Griffith, wipes this civilization off the face of the earth. Did Griffith know anything about history? The Babylonians were oppressive conquerors who, as seen in the Hebrew Bible, attempted to eradicate the Israelites of Judea by destroying their temple, outlawing their religious practices, and killing, enslaving, or relocating many of their people. Ishtar was as much a goddess of war as of love (and agriculture, as well), and her religious rites involved sacred prostitution, not romance. Cyrus the Great, far from being an intolerant war-mongerer, was extremely tolerant of the people in his dominion, respecting their religions, traditions, and laws and administering a highly organized government with an impeccable human rights record. The Hebrew Bible treats Cyrus as a vessel of God's will, ranking him almost amongst the prophets and the saints in terms of his importance. Without Cyrus, Judaism would have perhaps been erased. Without Cyrus, the subplot involving Jesus may have never happened.

Not too mention that without Jesus the subplot involving Catholics massacring Huguenots would have never happened either, but that's a completely different can of worms.

And what are we to make of the modern story--more about injustice than intolerance--which claims that prohibition and its dangerous trappings are the result of insecure old women who can no longer get laid, who jealously channel their sexual frustrations against beautiful, young people? What does it say about this treatise on intolerance that the motivation behind its major plot is rooted in sexism and ageism?

Intolerance is a strange film--undeniably artistic, but with obvious shortcomings. I don't consider it the masterpiece that others do, but it clearly paved the way for other masterpieces, and that's got to be worth something.

Intolerance (1916)
d: D.W. Griffith w: D.W. Griffith, Hettie Grey Baker, Tod Browning, et al
(Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Constance Talmadge, Alfred Paget)
TSPDT?: #54
8/10

Movie Review: The Birth of a Nation (1915)

There's something uncanny about seeing black people--in fact played by white people--holding their hands protectively over a ballot box while sad, defeated white people--also played by white people--walk away uncounted. In the reversal of The Birth of a Nation's denouement, when armed Klansmen on horseback prevent these same black people from exiting their homes on election day and making it to the polling centers, we at least have the sense that we're finally seeing a true approximation of history. What's scary is that we're supposed to be cheering at this return to "the way things should be" or "the way things always have been."

The Birth of a Nation is a frightened and frightening, unapologetic, and inaccurate defense of slavery, racism, and segregation, coupled with a heartfelt condemnation of war, which ironically was one of the only things that helped put an end to slavery in the United States. They say history is written by the victors, yet D.W. Griffith had the technical ingenuity and cinematic ambition to write his own grandiose account of history before the victors could. It's a scary and difficult thing to admit that you were wrong, even after defeat. Much easier is proving that you were right all along and that you should've won. The Birth of a Nation depicts Southern plantation owners as quaint, peaceful people with modest ambitions who participate in slavery because it fittingly supports the moral order of the cosmos: civilized white people making the important decisions while supporting the impulsive, primitive black people who wouldn't even know how to support themselves without white structure. In the Civil War itself, the Southern generals are courageous, fair, and heroic, and they only lose due to the dastardly tactics of the North. Reconstruction puts animals in charge of men, and the insistence that racism is a false doctrine encourages animals to try to rape ladies. How much better everything would be if those power-hungry, foolish Northerners would've just minded their own business!

When Barack Obama was running for the presidency and was likely to win, my 87-year-old Georgian grandfather asked me to alleviate his fears about a black man being in charge of the white people, to assure him that the black man, when the reins were finally changed, wouldn't retaliate with all the oppression and violence that had been inflicted on his kind in the past two centuries. Underlying this fear wasn't the belief that black people were savage animals but that they were too savagely human, that they would take their revenge when finally given the chance, that an eye would at long last be taken for an eye, and my grandfather had never expected to lose an eye and certainly didn't want to lose one now. It's frightening to see that some of the same fear of reprisal and unwillingness to apologize that inspired a 95-year-old movie still exists today.

It's common practice to praise D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation for its technical innovation and cinematic milestones rather than its naive, propagandistic message and blatant racism. I'm not in the habit of judging artistic merit by its historical importance, however--not unless it still manages to awe after history has passed. The Birth of a Nation horrifies but does not awe. Characterization is simple, the story is naive, the title card writing is immature, and the film stretches on much too long. Some scenes are genuinely executed in a heartfelt, touching manner--such as the grizzled hospital orderly in the background who snatches quick, loving looks at a pretty, young visitor while pretending to be disinterested, or the young, war-torn yet optimistic sister who fashions a primitive ballgown out of raw cotton in order to make her brother feel happy and at home upon his return from war, a "ballgown" which only emphasizes their fallen position yet still manages to crack a smile across his tortured face. Such scenes exist in frequent numbers in the over three hours of The Birth of a Nation, yet they are overshadowed by the racist proclamations that consistently steal the show. Should I be impressed that a scene in which "black" politicians who have taken over the senate floor and turned it into a pigsty cheer in exaltation while passing a law that allows them to have sex with white women actually inspires in me the disgust that Griffith intended? No, because that nauseating discomfort is ironic, inspired more by the surreal blackface and the ridiculous, racist historical inaccuracy than anything Griffith actually intended. I find it funny that Griffith had to hire white people in order to make his black villains truly revolting.

That blackface helps the viewer to see The Birth of a Nation for what it really is, an epic fantasy with no basis in reality.

The Birth of a Nation is #133 on the TSPDT? list of the greatest films of all time. This gives The Birth of a Nation the distinction of being the highest rated movie based solely on its innovative use of jump cuts and close-ups.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)
d: D.W. Griffith w: D.W. Griffith, Frank E. Woods
(Lillian Gish, Mae Walsh, Henry Walthall, Ralph Lewis, George Siegmann)
TSPDT?: #133
5/10