At the Movies with Governor Tom: Metropolis

Now why, you might ask, would a first-run theater like the ArcLight Hollywood show the 1927 flick Metropolis? Well, why not? It is awesome, after all, chockfull of fantastic, iconic imagery that has inspired and influenced just about every filmmaker and their cousin ever since.

More specifically, the ArcLight was showing Metropolis as part of this music program called Concrete Frequency. Organized by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Concrete Frequency is a multi-disciplinary program running from January 4-17, and it includes a whole bunch of concerts at Disney Concert Hall (the LA Phil's home base) as well as symposia and, of course, film screenings. The whole point of this program is, to quote the brochure here: "[T]o examine and celebrate the elements that define a city, and how they are affected by, and reflected in, music." Much as I'd like to (I look for any reason to visit Disney Hall), I won't have the time to attend any of the concerts, but I will attend two of the three films being shown as part of this event: Metropolis as well as A Clockwork Orange, which I'll write about in a separate post. The third film is Taxi Driver. Since I just saw that on the big screen a couple years ago, I opted for the Mad Money screening held the same night at the ArcLight Sherman Oaks so I could see Callie Khouri in person.

Looking at the brochure again, these concerts really do include an eclectic array of stuff. First you've got scores like The City by Aaron Copland and Ameriques by Varese, and songs like "Central Park in the Dark" by Ives. And you've got stuff by Frank Zappa as well as by very current acts like Sondre Lerche, Zooey Deschanel, Stevie Jackson from the group Belle and Sebastian, Inara George from The Bird and the Bee, Kyp Malone from TV on the Radio, and Zach Rogue from Rogue Wave. If only I didn't have a job, I'd've gone to see all those people. Real life just gets in the way sometimes, you know?

The Metropolis screening was followed by a Q&A with Variety film critic Jon Burlingame interviewing an elderly German dude named Cornelius Schnauber. As it turns out, Cornelius was best buds with Metropolis director Fritz Lang back in the sixties and seventies, during the last decade or so of Fritz's life. He's also got quite the CV. Check it out: professor of German at the University of Southern California since '69, director of USC's Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss studies, and the author of the book Fritz Lang in Hollywood as well as about 30 or so other nonfiction books, novels, and plays. Oh, and when he's bored, Cornelius also does duty as a German dialect coach for the Los Angeles Opera company, one of my homes away from home.

Before I talk about all the great stuff Cornelius talked about afterward, let's talk about the flick first. You ever see it? Back in 2002, it was released on the big screen with a brand new print in honor of the film's 75th birthday. It was shown with as much footage as could be found, just over two hours' worth, as well as the original score by Gottfried Huppertz put back in. That was a big deal because back in the eighties it had apparently been shown with a more modern rock'n'roll score, which sounds positively dreadful and which I'm so glad I didn't see. Even so, about thirty minutes of footage from Fritz Lang's original final cut is still missing. For those missing chunks, the screen goes black and shows these white titles that would explain the missing scenes. Since it's a silent film, you'd get white titles on a black screen anyway, like for dialogue and exposition, but those were in a very fancy kind of script while the explanation titles for the missing scenes were in a very plain font, like courier or what have you. This same cut was what the ArcLight showed last night. And by the way, in case you're wondering, the answer is yes. The 75th birthday cut is also available on DVD. Can anyone say Netflix?

The gist of the story is this. It's set in the year 2027 or so (about a hundred years in the future from the time it was made). The setting is this massive unnamed city with skyscrapers so tall they practically flirt with the clouds. The city's populace is divided into two halves. First, you've got the workers. They work way down underground and basically bust their butts making all the great technology in the city above functional. And then you've got all the wealthy folk who live way up yonder in a place called the Club of the Sons. These people have never worked a day in their lives. This is where the mayor lives, a chap called Fredersen, Joh Fredersen. The main character of the film is his twentysomething son Freder.

When the film starts out, right? After we've been introduced to the soul-deadened zombie-like workers shuffling back and forth in shifts, we meet Freder up in this giant, resplendent garden called the Eternal Gardens. If this film were in color, you could just imagine all the greenage. Anyway, one of the servants picks a prostitute to go give Freder a good time. While Freder and the prostitute are chasing each other around this fountain, a woman from the depths shows up with all of these children. Her name's Maria, and her message to Freder is this: These are the children of all the workers down there who make your life run smoothly. These kids are your brothers. They're miserable, and subterranean life in general is miserable. Maria and Freder also do a lot of staring at each other. You know that Freder is smitten from the get-go. When Maria and the kids are escorted out of the garden, Freder's like, "Whoa! Who was that? And how can I see her again?"

And so that's what he tries to do. He goes down to the Lower City and, while he doesn't find Maria, he sees the workers busting their tails. One of the workers collapses from exhaustion. The machine he'd been working at blows up, and several workers are killed. Freder watches drop jawed as the workers are disposed of and replaced like so many broken dishes. He goes back up to the Club of the Sons and barges into Dad's office. He's like, "Dad, what the hell?!" But Joh Fredersen says yeah, that's just the way it has to be. Frustrated, Freder makes his way back down to the Lower City and takes the place of a worker named 11811. The plot thickens, though. In the pocket of one of those blown up workers is a map of secret catacombs below the Lower City. Grot, who's in charge of the Heart Machine in the Lower City, shows this map to His Honor Joh Fredersen. Joh, as you might imagine, is less than thrilled.

So Joh pays a visit to his old pal Rotwang, an inventor who lives alone in this cottage somewhere away from all the city bustle. Rotwang, in a word, is a nutjob. He's a mad inventor who has just finished his latest so-called masterpiece, the Machine-Man, which is basically a robot. Joh didn't come over to be impressed by robots, though. He wants to vent about how the workers seem to be getting restless, and how his son doesn't like him anymore. More importantly, though, he wants Rotwang to help him interpret the catacombs map. For his part, Rotwang also has a need to vent. His one and only true love, Hel, chose to marry Joh, and then she died giving birth to Freder. Still unable to get over her death, Rotwang has built the Machine-Man to be his Hel. Only one more day of work, he says, and the robot will look exactly like Hel. "Take that, Your Honor!" he basically says. Still, he looks at the map and tells Joh that it leads to a secret meeting place below the Lower City. So they go to the catacombs and discover a bunch of workers listening to Maria regale them with the fable about the Tower of Babel. The slaves built the tower and then destroyed it because no common language could be found between the slaves and their masters. She says their city will be different. Soon a mediator will show up and erase the misunderstandings between the workers and the filthy rich people. Rotwang notices Freder amongst the workers but decides not to tell Joh. After the meeting, Maria recognizes Freder from the beginning of the film and knows he's destined to be the mediator she was just talking about.

And the plot keeps getting more urgent. Steamed, Joh Fredersen tells Rotwang to scrap his plans for recreating Hel and instead make the robot in the image of this gal Maria. Rotwang thinks about it and decides it's not a bad idea. He doesn't tell Joh this, but he knows that creating a fake Maria is only going to further splinter the relationship between Joh Fredersen and Freder. Yes, like I said, Rotwang is still bitter about Hel leaving him for Joh Fredersen. Anyway, so Rotwang kidnaps Maria, binds her to a table back at his lab, and uses her likeness to finish his work on the Machine-Man. More than that, Rotwang instructs his new creation to destroy Joh Fredersen and his stupid metropolis.

Rotwang brings the false Maria to Joh Fredersen's office to show her off. Freder walks in to find his dad ogling who he thinks is the real Maria. Shocked, Freder collapses and is taken into a sickroom. The false Maria, meanwhile, goes to Yoshiwara, the nightlife district, and puts on a show for all the rich guys. The Club of the Sons becomes abandoned as everyone wants to see this new hottie at Yoshiwara. Duels break out for her favor. Young studly rich guys kill other young studly rich guys.

The false Maria then goes down to the catacombs where she tells the workers to drop what they're doing and destroy all the machines. The workers have no idea she's a phony and so they do what she says. This precipitates a huge flood that threatens to drown the children of these very workers.

So what do you think happens? You've got the hero Freder lying heartbroken and delirious up in his dad's office because he thinks Maria and Dad are in cahoots. You've got Maria held captive by Rotwang the psycho inventor. Everyone and their cousin has gone to Yoshiwara to see this new hottie, the same hottie who's now incited two riots: the first in Yoshiwara, the other down in the catacombs that has placed all the kiddies in peril. Chaos everywhere is coming to a head. Now go throw this sucker onto your Netflix queue and see how it turns out.

To preface the Q&A, Cornelius Schnauber said that he was best friends with Fritz Lang for the last seven years of his life (1969-76). Then he corrected himself and said, well, maybe he'd been Fritz's second best friend. Fritz, he said, had a stuffed monkey named Peter of whom he was quite fond. He also pointed out that at the time it was made, Metropolis was by far and away the most expensive motion picture ever made. It cost about five million Marks which, adjusted for today's dollars, comes out to something like $200 million.

Jon Burlingame's first question was about Fritz Lang's opinion of the film. Cornelius said that Fritz absolutely hated Metropolis. The main reason for this, according to Cornelius, was that Fritz's third wife, Lily Latte, was an unabashed Communist, and that her politics eventually rubbed off on Fritz. So while the message of the film is that the heart needs to be the mediator between the head and the hands, Lily and eventually Fritz thought that the head represented the exploiting capitalists and the hands represented the oppressed workers and that the so-called mediator between the two had to be the class struggle. Also, Fritz was disgusted with how he overlooked making the planes futuristic. In the establishing shots, the planes flying through the city look like the bi-planes of the time, as opposed to what planes may have looked a hundred years in the future. Apparently Fritz had been so focused on the other aspects of the film that he just didn't think about having fun with futuristic planes. This drove him nuts, apparently, to his dying day.

Whatever else he was focused on, Fritz always swore that he never had affairs with his lead actress...while the film was being shot. Because if you tried that, the actress could end up blackmailing you. No, really, Fritz really did explain himself in just that way. Once the film was wrapped, it was a "whole different story," Cornelius said. Apparently Lily Latte was Fritz's mistress while he was still married to his second wife, Thea von Harbou.

This led to a discussion about the women in Fritz's life. We'd already spoken about Lily. Now Cornelius talked about Thea. She and Fritz were not only a couple but creative partners as well. She wrote the novel Metropolis as well as the screenplay adaptation. She also wrote the scripts for four other Fritz flicks, including M. One of the irreconcilable differences that undid their marriage was that Thea became an ardent Nazi. It's probably no coincidence that Fritz and Thea divorced in 1933. That was the year Hilter became Reichskanzler. Even with their falling out, Fritz always defended Thea. Metropolis had been her story, and the story's message about the heart being the mediator wasn't something a Nazi would find favor with. Still, that doesn't explain why Thea went on to write and direct films for the Nazi propaganda machine. She could've done what Fritz did, which was to get the heck out of Dodge. Here's how that happened. The same year the Nazis came to power, Fritz directed this flick called The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse. The just-elected Nazis banned the sucker because of a scene at the end when the bad guy recites Nazi slogans or something. Just after the ban went into effect, Josef Goebbels himself invited Fritz to his office, apologized for the ban...and then offered Fritz a gig as production supervisor at German Cinema Institute. Fritz said he'd think about it, then hopped on the next train to Paris and never looked back. He was in Paris a year before he moved to Hollywood. The position offered him was eventually accepted by Leni Riefenstahl.

One more woman Cornelius talked about was actress Brigitte Helm, who made her acting debut as Maria in Metropolis. She was 19 at the time, and went on to have quite the career for the next eight years. She made something like three dozen or so films in which she almost always had the lead role. When silent films gave way to the talkies, she didn't miss a beat. Like Fritz, though, she packed up and left her homeland because she couldn't stand Adolf. In her case, she settled in Switzerland, got married, had four kiddies, and never acted again. She was offered the lead role in The Blue Angel but said no (it went to Marlene Dietrich). James Whale wanted her for The Bride of Frankenstein, but she was like, "Nah." And so Brigitte lived the next 60 years in relative calm as a hausfrau, raising her family.

Fritz's transition to Hollywood, however, was anything but calm. The bottom line? No one liked him. He established a solid reputation as being a difficult bastard while still in Germany, and he brought that with him to Hollywood. Actors didn't like working with him, and even other filmmakers didn't like hanging out with him. Throughout the Q&A Cornelius talked about two directors in particular who were contemporaries of Fritz: Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann. Have you heard of either of them? If not, maybe some of their films will ring a bell. Billy Wilder directed stuff like Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Stalag 17, Sabrina, The Seven Year Itch, Witness for the Prosecution, Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. Meanwhile, Fred Zinnemann was churning out stuff like The Day of the Jackal, Oklahoma!, From Here to Eterinity, High Noon, and Julia. Like Fritz, Fred Zinnemann was born and bred in Vienna. Billy Wilder wasn't Viennese but did come from Austria. Both Billy and Fred cited Fritz Lang and Metropolis in particular has having been a big influence on them, but they weren't too fond of Fritz as a person. As I said up top, Metropolis has influenced a ton of filmmakers. Cornelius said that Fritz was perfectly aware of that influence but was never comfortable with it because he came to loathe the film. Having been his best bud for the last decade of Fritz's life, Cornelius said that Fritz wasn't a big bastard like everyone said. In fact, Cornelius said a lot of that was just a front and that Fritz was a pussycat in private.

However difficult Fritz was as a person, at least the curmudgeon knew how to make due with what he had. All of Metropolis, Cornelius said, was filmed on a single soundstage no bigger than the auditorium we were all sitting in. Further, Fritz had little use for moving his camera with cranes or dollies, two pieces of equipment which cost on arm and a leg even today. Instead, most of Metropolis was filmed with stationary cameras. That decision was in part practical but was also aesthetically influenced by Fritz's background in architecture. He'd majored in architecture in college and had always planned on that as a career. So he knew how to make due with the space in which he had to shoot, and he knew how to use mirrors to augment the illusion of a vast cityscape.

Since Metropolis was being shown as part of L.A. Phil's Concrete Frequency music program, Jon Burlingame made a point of asking about the guy who composed the music for the film. His name was Gottfried Huppertz. Gottfried made quite a living doing film scores. Fritz hired him to do the soundtracks for his two Niebelungen films, and Gottfried found work with other filmmakers as well. For Metropolis he used elements of Strauss and Wagner, and he actually played the piano on the set while Fritz was shooting. He played the music that would eventually be played by the orchestra to help get the desired emotional reactions from the actors. He also used "Dies Irae" which, if you've seen the film and how it all builds up emotionally, makes perfect sense. Unfortunately poor Gottfried only lived to be 50.

As a former student of German language and literature, I was very interested to hear from Cornelius how Fritz Lang and other German and Austrian filmmakers like Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann were influenced by German literature. In Metropolis, for instance, Rotwang's Machine-Man was directly influenced by the Homunculus from Goethe's Faust. Of course it seemed obvious after he pointed that out, but now it makes me want to go back and read Faust again. Have you ever read anything by Goethe? He's basically to the German-speaking peoples what Shakespeare is to the English-speaking world, the greatest writer that language has ever known.

Jon asked Cornelius if there would ever be a chance, no matter how small, that Fritz's original 153-minute Metropolis print would ever be found. Cornelius answered unequivocally in the negative. For a while after it was made, every time it was shown somewhere would mean a new edit for the film. The stuff cut out for that new edit would be disposed of, including the original negative. So that means that this two-hour 75th birthday print would be as complete a print as we were ever going to see.

It's too bad Fritz kicked the proverbial bucket when he did, because he was working on something that everyone, no matter their personal feelings for him, would have loved to see. When the 85-year-old died on August 2, 1976 (nine days before I was born, by the way), he'd been in preproduction on a documentary about hippies. Come on now. How awesome would it have been to have the mad genius behind Metropolis, M, and Scarlet Street do a piece about hippies?!