It’s a tale as old as time. Boy meets girl across the class divide. Boy falls for girl. Girl falls for boy. Girl gets abducted by mad scientist and replaced by robot duplicate designed to ferment a failed revolution to crush the working classes. Boy rescues girl, chucks mad scientist off a church and evil robot gets burned at the stake. Everyone lives happily ever after.
We’ve all been there, let’s be honest.
It’s hard, when writing about Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis, to really know where to begin. Such is the permeation of the film into popular culture – in terms of text, visuals, even just conceptually – that it’s almost become a cliché.
In many ways, it’s the acme of modern science fiction film and television. The design of the city, all gleaming skyscrapers and monorails where the gentry lord it up, and slums and workers kept underground, toiling to keep their masters in the life. It’s also, in many ways, the acme for modern film criticism – a bloated, overlong, troubled movie whose profligate budget-breaking and controversies would colour commentary to the point of serving as premature obituaries for the movie before the majority had ever seen it.
Reappraisal, like many of the classics dubbed a flop and failure on release, has turned a production dubbed “the silliest film” by a salty HG Wells into something upheld as a modern classic.
New York state of mind
The origin of Metropolis comes not from the fantastical worlds of science fiction or fantasy, but from a boat trip. Lang and his UFA studios producer Erich Pommer claim they were captivated by the Manhattan lights on an October evening in 1924, as their cruise ship came in to dock. That New York vista, all tall buildings, glowing lights and Art Deco stylings, put in their minds the idea of a story about a giant city.
Of course, that’s not – as with these things – the whole truth. Metropolis, as a story, was already well underway as a novel and script by the time Lang headed to the States. Pommer had mentioned it as a future project after the Berlin premiere of Die Nibelungen in January of that year, while press reports talked about Lang’s wife and collaborator von Harbou writing the script for it that July.
Pommer and Lang were in America on business, too. Far from being an enchanting experience which inspired a film, they were there to try and secure the future of UFA. The German film industry that had boomed in part because of the country’s financial crisis was now struggling to make ends meet after US studios began dumping their films cheaply on the country’s cinema screens. The trip to the US was the start of brokering what would become Parufamet – a joint venture between Paramount, MGM and UFA to give the German studio a leg-up in the States (and, crucially, a 17m Reichsmark loan), and to secure guaranteed bookings for American films in UFA’s cinemas.
The first major film of this agreement which would be shown in America would be Metropolis. With Paramount’s distribution, and the extra money burning a hole in their pockets, Pommer and Lang saw Metropolis as their chance to make a proper international hit.
Cameras rolled on Metropolis on May 22 1925. At more than 800,000 Reichsmark, it was already set to be one of the costliest productions in European cinema – coming in with a budget more than four times that of the average feature film at the time.
The script came from the pen of von Harbou. She and Lang had married two years previously, following the start of their affair in 1920. Already a successful writer – with a notably nationalist bent – and novelist before their partnership, she had started transitioning to screenplays even before their relationship began. Together they wrote Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, while she wrote Die Nibelungen before starting work on Metropolis. Somewhat unusually, she wrote the novel version first, adapting it into an ultimately much stripped-down script which removed many of the more supernatural elements of her original story.
Meanwhile Lang reunited with many of the crew from Die Nibelungen to make Metropolis, along with experts from FW Murnau’s regular team to help with in-camera tricks as they looked for new ways to bring the fantastical elements of von Harbou’s script – which, depending on who you asked, was set anywhere between the late 20th century and the year 3000.
Among the crew was Eugen Schüfftan, who pioneered a new special effects technique for the film which, until blue screen and travelling matte came along, was the industry standard way of combining live-action elements such as actors with miniature sets. If you want to know what sort of year he ended up having, he went from Metropolis to work on effects cinematography for Abel Gance’s Napoleon. These days, he’d have all the Oscars…
If the crew were familiar faces to Lang, much of the cast were not. Brigitte Helm, just 17 years old at the time, had only been in school plays before auditioning for Lang – reportedly at the behest of her mother – while Gustav Fröhlich had originally just been hired as a background extra, before von Harbou took a shine to him and pointed out the former vaudeville actor to the director.
Starring in what would be the biggest film of its kind would be a lot to hang on the shoulders of two inexperienced young actors at the best of times. Little did they know what they were about to let themselves in for.
Lang’s meticulous, demanding approach included lengthy rehearsal time and long, gruelling shoots. One of his collaborators claimed in his memoirs that the director insisted on getting three perfect takes to choose from for every scene. This approach meant one of the most famous set pieces in the film was also its most notorious – with Lang taking two weeks to shoot the sequence of the underground city flooding, resulting in Helm and hundreds of young kids from some of Berlin’s most impoverished areas being forced time and time again into a tank of deliberately cold water. One of the adult extras involved in the sequence caught pneumonia and suffered permanent damage to their voice, decrying Lang as responsible for years to come.
When the cameras finally stopped rolling on Metropolis, nearly 18 months had passed. Production finished on October 30, 1926, with 310 filming days and 60 night shoots. The final budget for Metropolis topped out well into the millions. UFA would say it was around 4.3 million Reichsmarks. Lang insisted it was less; some researchers put the total much higher – closer to 5 million. UFA had spent half its entire annual production budget on one film – the rest had to be spread thinly around 21 other scheduled productions.
The cost of Metropolis was more than just financial, however. It had already started to develop notoriety in the trade without a single frame having yet been screened to the public. A media industry cropped up around it, with regular reporting on the latest rumours and production issues in the press. Wild numbers circulated around the gossip columns and the trade press. 36,000 extras used. 620,000 metres of film shot. UFA tried to get ahead of it, presenting some of the excess as signs of how epic the film was, only to find the figures being used as blunt objects to beat the movie with before it had even come out.
And the troubled production had claimed its first casualty – Pommer departing for a producer’s job at Paramount as UFA began to get twitchy…
First impressions
Barely ten weeks after filming had finished, Metropolis premiered at the beautiful UFA Palast cinema near Berlin Zoo. A cold January night wasn’t enough to deter the crowds – more than 1,200 people crammed into the arena for the premiere.
The great and the good of the country were there to see the debut of Lang’s epic, from ambassadors and minor royals to the Reichskanzier – effectively Germany’s vice president.
VIPs got the full gala treatment. Newly made copies of von Harbou’s novel, fresh off the presses and bound in pig skin. A gala brochure. Even gramophone recordings of the score, with an introduction on the vinyl spoken by Lang himself. UFA went all out to make the first public sighting of Metropolis as much an event as the production had been, a hype machine barely seen in European cinema at this point.
The original cut for the premiere ran at three hours, with an interval scheduled part-way through. As the great and good mingled for their mid-movie refreshments, though, it was clear that reception to Metropolis was going to be mixed, at best.
The day after the gala premiere, the film transferred to another of UFA’s cinemas in Berlin, and opened in Vienna, while a copy of the film was taken out to the USA for Paramount executives to view. Neither went well. Box office takings in Berlin for the much-hyped epic were low enough for the studio to panic and pull it from the schedules, ordering a re-edited version which would lose around a quarter of the movie to shorten the running time.
Paramount was similarly concerned. The film was way too long to fit the normal screening schedule, particularly given it featured no household names in America and a plot the executives found too confusing. They brought in US playwright Channing Pollock – formerly the drama critic of the Washington Post – to not just rewrite the intertitles but the entire film, creating a cut-down version which could be fashioned from the original. Its shortened running time would be even less than UFA’s re-edit, the hope being that bringing it down to less than two hours would mean more screenings and, hopefully, Paramount recouping more money on it.
Ultimately, it would be to no avail. Lang’s great epic failed to set the box office alight, in any form, and turned out to be a money-loser. Worse, soon afterwards, Warners released The Jazz Singer, heralding the beginning of the talkies era. In quick order, Metropolis looked like a film from a bygone era.
A changing world
Metropolis’ real story, though was just beginning, even as the cinema run was ending.
Lang’s reputation took a dent after their failure of Metropolis, not helped by his next two films also struggling at the box office. In 1931, however, he directed and co-wrote with von Harbou the acclaimed film noir M – his first ‘talkie’ – which proved a box office hit both in Europe and, crucially, also found success in the US.
But the return to success came at a price. Their next film, Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse, would fall foul of the increasing grip the Nazis had on Germany. Seen as an anti-Nazi movie, Joseph Goebbels banned its release, calling it a risk to public health and safety.
At the same time, Lang and von Harbou’s relationship had broken down. Their marriage was, albeit unofficially, an open one, and while they presented as a happy couple while regularly hosting parties and events at their home, the director was taking a string of young women as lovers. Eventually, though, the tables turned when he discovered von Harbou in bed with Indian journalist Ayi Tendulkar, who was 16 years younger than her.
Lang met with Goebbels, who told him Hitler wanted the director to make films for the Nazi’s vision of Germany, citing Metropolis as a film the dictator liked and wanted more of. Lang bolted for France that night, eventually moving to the USA ahead of the start of World War 2.
Von Harbou, however, remained. Despite marrying Tendulkar in secret, she joined the Nazis to write and direct films for the regime. She would later claim her membership of the party was a cover, to enable her husband to help Indian immigrants in the increasingly hostile fascist Germany. When war broke out, Tendulkar was forced to leave the country, and their relationship ended.
Lang and von Harbou, so prolific and important a partnership to German cinema throughout their time together, would rarely be in contact after their divorce – although Lang would later adapt one of her novels towards the end of his career.
Thea died in July 1954, aged just 65, after suffering a fall. A few years later, his eyesight deteriorating, Lang retired from filmmaking, after a successful two decades in Hollywood. He died in 1976 following a stroke.
Whether through its approval by the Nazis, or its connection with von Harbou, Lang rarely spoke fondly of Metropolis after he left Germany, once telling Peter Bogdanovich in an interview that he ‘detested’ the film.
A muted legacy
Metropolis became one of those films which would get occasional screenings in cinemas and, increasingly on television. The re-edited versions which were shown – which were further cut down from the UFA re-edits by the Nazis – meant the original, epic orchestral score by Gottfried Huppertz no longer fitted.
A temporary lapse in copyright of the film in the mid-70s opened the door for anyone to do what they wanted with it. And what they most wanted to do with it was play with the music.
The futurist designs and sci-fi visuals of the film loaned themselves perfectly to the emerging wave of next-generation avant-garde musicians experimenting with synths and electronics, building on the musique concrète movement of the 1950s and the radiophonica that escaped from the Maida Vale basements of the BBC.
Two such musicians – electronic pioneer Hugh Davies and William Fitzwater – produced an avant-garde electronic score for the BBC for its showings of the film in the 1970s, while Christopher Neal – who went on to make the music for Farscape – did the same in Australia.
Over the subsequent decades, new versions and rescorings of Metropolis would pop up, covering everything from the Club Foot Orchestra to Jeff Mills, Dieter Moebius to accordion accompaniments. But one version would set the tone for what was to come – and pave the way for Metropolis’ eventual return to the limelight.
Oscar-winning record producer Giorgio Moroder won a bidding war for the rights to the film from the FW Murnau Foundation in 1982, beating off a rival bid from David Bowie in the process, having kicked around the idea for a couple of years of taking an old, archival film and restoring it for modern audiences with a modern soundtrack.
The approach he took, which debuted at Cannes in 1984, was as controversial as it was bold.
Effectively, he created the first mass-market remix movie.
Restructuring not just the soundtrack – a combination of popular artists he’d work with underscored by his own electronic compositions to bridge the gaps – but also the visuals, re-editing the film to work around the missing segments, adding in new captions and controversially tinting scenes to bring colour to Lang’s monochrome world. Intertitles were turned into subtitles, scenes were tightened, and the running time brought down to a brisk 80 minutes.
He assembled a Who’s Who of chart stars to appear on his reversioned Metropolis – most notably Queen, still one of the biggest bands in the world and a group that would draw on Metropolis themselves in creating the video for Radio Gaga X years later.
Not only was his new version a cult success, it also breathed new life into the idea of the film itself. While purists may have grumbled at the modernised approach Moroder adopted, it put Metropolis – on big screen and small – in front of entirely new, and this time receptive audiences.
Growing up in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a semi-regular fixture. From being thrown on sci-fi and silent movie seasons on Channel 4 to the iconic image of the Maschinenmensch’s transformation featuring at the heart of the Tomorrow’s World title sequence.
Metropolis even took to the stage. An ambitious West End musical production, headlined by Brian Blessed and Judy Kuhn, opened at the Piccadilly Theatre where, despite much press attention for the elaborate staging and picking up an Olivier nomination for Kuhn, it was an expensive flop that closed within six months.
And while the critics and purists may have decried his 1980s adaptation, what Moroder did was more than breathe life into a film that at that point was, to all intents and purposes, dead. In his pursuit of the highest quality prints to remaster, he began a search for missing pieces, tracking down photos and captions which had not been seen since 1926.
Enno Patalas, the director of Munich’s film museum, had already started trying to restore the film in the 1970s before acting as a consultant on Moroder’s version in exchange for the record producer striking a new, high-quality print of the negatives. More and more pieces of the jigsaw began to be uncovered through the 1980s and 1990s, from annotated scripts to production stills taken by Thea von Harbou’s brother Horst.
Patalas had called Metropolis, for all the pieces they had managed to recover over the years, a ‘ruin in progress’. But surely, nearly 20 years of searching and restoring, the extended but still patchwork version of the film which came out on DVD in 2003 was the nearest we were ever going to get to Lang’s original vision.
And then came the miracle of Buenos Aires.
Found footage
Missing film material has a remarkable habit of turning up when it’s not expected.
Doctor Who fans will take much delight in regaling audiences about how junked stories from the 1960s have turned up in the basement of churches, in tin shacks in Africa, or in obscure outposts in Hong Kong. A print of long-lost horror The Telltale Heart was found in an attic in Stranraer. A copy of a lost Tarzan film was found in a cupboard in an old asylum in France.
But Metropolis was the holy grail of discoveries. So much work had been done by the Bundesarchiv and so much discovered it was feared the trail had gone cold, that everything out there that could be found had been.
But in 2008 came the most incredible find of all.
The new head of Buenos Aires’ film museum was told by her ex-husband – also a film archive director – about a screening of Metropolis held by a private film club in the Argentine city, which had surprised people there by being much longer than expected. The print they showed at that screening was somewhere in the museum.
The pair managed to track down the film – an ancient, scratched 16mm print, sitting virtually unremarked in the archive for the best part of 16 years.
German magazine Zeit managed to piece together its unlikely history. A film distributor from Buenos Aires, Adolfo Wilson, had somehow arranged for a copy of the original edit of Metropolis to be sent to Argentina in 1928 for screening in cinemas there. Soon afterwards, a local film critic took possession of the film reels, adding them to his own private collection.
Four decades later, he sold them on to Argentina’s National Art Fund, apparently oblivious to the nature of what he had, with a copy being struck which got passed around before ending up at the Museo de Cinema in 1992.
On viewing the reels, the experts were stunned. Barring one cut scene, it was the entire movie as Lang originally screened at Palast Am Zoo. The print was in a terrible state – a 16mm duplicate, scratched, marked, and worn by time and neglect. A couple of segments were degraded so much they were virtually unplayable.
But the archivists and digital restoration team, who had spent years hunting and piecing together the fragments of the film, were able to clean it up as much as possible and, in 2010, it was released back into cinemas and on Blu-ray as Lang had originally intended.
It had taken 83 years, but finally, Metropolis had been rebuilt.
A vision of our future
As we head towards Metropolis’ centennial celebrations, it’s an astonishing reflection of just how long and significant a shadow it has cast over the genre films and visions that would follow.
There’s a reason it was the first film to be added by UNESCO to the Global Memory of the World Programme, a project to archive as many important cultural and documentary artefacts as possible. The film itself has become a foundational stone upon which 100 years of imagery and storytelling, thematic and visual, has been built. The Art Deco futurism and the gothic menace, the social conscience and the mad scientist, the epic scale and the romantic heart. You can draw a through line from the Babelsberg studios in 1926 to the soundstages and volumes of today.
One version of the original Metropolis script would have had Freder going into space at the end. While that, thankfully, was culled in rewrites, it shows how even deeper the genre roots of Metropolis could have extended. As it is, the family tree of the effects-driven billion-dollar blockbusters that have dominated cinema since the 1970s has its roots embedded deep in the vision of Lang and von Harbou.
But even more than that, time, technology and society have caught up with the vision the film depicts. As mentioned above, the time Metropolis is set within is nebulous depending on which source you believe, but many – including Moroder’s remix – took a centurion view and placed its story in 2026.
The story decried as simplistic by critics and silly by Herbert George Wells – who may have been a tad hacked off at perceived similarities to one of his own stories, admittedly – has taken on new life. Its depiction of a generation of lower-class workers, driven by their uncaring, rich overlords high in their beautiful skyscrapers to constantly feed the machine and the apparatus which keeps their world working, looks increasingly less like science fiction and alleged communist propaganda, and more like a relatable depiction of 21st-century life.
The further away we see Metropolis in the rear view mirror, the closer it appears we’ve travelled to it.
The story of the making and remaking of Metropolis remains a fascinating one a century on. But the story of Metropolis itself is one which is eternal.
All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.