I've watched the start of Metropolis a few times, but because it's a black and white, subtitled film from the twenties, BBC2 always stuck it on late at night and I dozed off.
Watched it and didn't snore once! Reviewing a classic is pointless
*, but I was struck by how beautiful the cinematography and production design are. I watched
The Lady Vanishes around the same time, which is great, but, like most US and UK films of the period, looks like a pool of sick next to this.
And the performances are
wild! Lang's
M is one of my favourite movies, but the tone of the acting in that is mostly naturalistic, apart from Lorre's deranged killer. In Metropolis, *EVERYONE* is giving it the full Nicolas Cage
**, maybe because they were stage actors who felt they had to compensate for the lack of dialogue?
The actress who plays Maria is never done clutching her boobs to express emotion and the youthful male lead (a middle-aged man in Kabuki slap) reacts to discovering her
*** in the arms of his father by miming a seal balancing on a beach ball for at least a minute (in long shot, too).
It's a truly brilliant film, but it reminded me of an
awful film. The ruler of a vast future city conspires with an outcast to foment disorder using a robot that gives me a hard-on - and the whole thing ends with a rooftop fight and the villain falling from a high building.
William Wisher definitely screened this before he wrote the screenplay for the 1995 Stallone film.
* On the Chart Music podcast, host Al Needham usually provides a short biographical introduction to each featured act, but when a show covers an episode of Top Of The Pops containing a performance by an artist who's become part of the furniture of public life he'll begin FORMED AS THE QUARRYMEN IN LIVERPOOL IN 1960, THE BEATLES ARE *THE*FUCKING*BEATLES*, before getting on with the discussion of this specific performance, since there's nothing new to be said about a topic on which everyone already has an entrenched opinion
** When Cage was doing the rounds for Mandy, he described what he was aspiring to in his more hysterical and mannered performances as German Expressionism. The only reference point I had for that was Lorre in M, but I can see this was probably a much greater influence
*** Her robot equivalent, anyway. Special mention must be made of Brigitte Helm's fantastic characterisation of Metal Maria, whose droopy eyelid and bizarre posture (neck thrust forward at shoulder height) allow her to be distinguished from her fleshy progenitor. She also performs the least sexy Sexy Dance committed to film - not sure whether that's because she's a robot or because she's German
