"There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator. "

When silent films are discussed today, if they are even discussed at all, only a few directors are mentioned. There was D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock gets lumped in with the silents, all those great comedic directors (Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd) and then Fritz Lang. The great German director, probably had the best transition to sound of any real silent director, Hitchcock doesn’t really count as a silent director since he made only a handful of silent pictures.

The masterpiece of Lang’s silent work is a 1927 science-fiction movie that has influenced other movies as far as style goes and has allowed film theorists to debate its allegorical message. The movie is Metropolis, the first film to deal with the utopian society.

Before getting into the allegorical aspects of the story involving a world literally divided into two halves, the upper and lower, with the workers in the lower half and the elites on the upper and how a mediator is the only one who can bring the two together – lets look at the stylistic achievements of the movie.

Metropolis is a German Expressionism film so it has all those great shadows we associate with the style. Although it is not as good as say Nosferatu (1921) for shadows. What separates this movie from others like it is the art deco architecture. The towering cities and the Tower of Babel of the upper class are brought to full life. All futuristic cities in fiction owe a little something to this movie for their design. The movie Blade Runner (1983) is a good example of a movie that has copied some of the skyscraper features from Metropolis.

Now for a modern audience it is a little hard to watch and see Model T’s roaming the streets in the year 2027. Also the single engine planes look out of date, but the large highways that roam around the tops of the skyscrapers still haven’t happened and are closer to being a reality than any sort of flying car.

A lot more attention could be paid to the different shots Lang got in the movie, but that would turn into a technical discussion of lighting and camera work and I am not qualified to discuss in great detail how Lang got some of this breathtaking shots. All I know is Lang was a perfectionist who demanded the most from his cast and crew. The cast especially.

At the end of the movie a robot named Hel is being burned at the stake. The evil villain in this story is a scientist named Rotwang, who all mad scientists seem to be based off of. He has created a robot who looks a lot like the angelic girl who is going to keep the workers from starting a revolution until a mediator is found. This girl’s name is obviously Maria, a variation of Mary. The mediator’s name is Freder. Freder happens to be the son of the man who owns all of Metropolis and lives above the workers. Obviously there is one allegorical reading of the movie.

Getting back to the fire scene though. The actress who plays Maria, Brigitte Helm, was strapped to the stake and Lang had extras move in and actually set the wood around her feet on fire. Lang was disappointed because there was not enough smoke the first time he shot the scene. So the fire was put out and Helm was subject to more smoke inhalation and the possibility of being burned before Lang was satisfied with the final product.

For his part, Lang wanted a machine like quality from a lot of the actors in the film. To get this effect he made them do the same scene over and over until they were too tired to care what they were doing. This technique is either brilliant or cruel and unusual punishment. Whatever you call it, it worked and looks great on-screen.

Any time a German movie from the 1920s is discussed, it has to be looked at in the contest of what would happen to the country in the next decade. Unfortunately for Lang the movie was Hitler’s favorite. In fact Hitler’s minister of propaganda gave Lang the opportunity to make movies for the Nazi government. Upon receiving the offer, Lang took the next train he could out of the country and left for America. He left behind him his wife, Thea von Harbou, who wrote the movie and was deeply involved with the Nazi party.

Lang himself did not care much for the allegories the film would receive after it was learned that Hitler enjoyed it so much. Some thought it was the perfect Nazi propaganda movie. As the city is basically controlled by one man. Hitler believed if the man had actually been him, there would have been no revolution by the workers, as there is in the movie.

What Lang did care about and what hurt him for many years is the way the movie’s ending was received. It ends with Freder taking the hand of the foreman of the workers and joining it with his father’s. The message of the movie is that the head (Frederson) and hands (workers) can only be joined by the heart (Freder). It is rather anticlimactic and critics said so. Lang would go back and forth throughout his life as to whether the idea for the ending was his or not. Depending on which interview you read you’ll see him defending it or condemning it.

Metropolis is a silent movie. It is also a long one that has pieces of the original missing. This may make it hard for some to watch, but the cinematography is so good that is overshadows the time spent watching and the terrible acting.