It came from "Metropolis": The legacy of a classic

[MacBeth]

Slide show (at the link below): From "Star Wars" to Madonna, we look at how Fritz Lang's re-released masterpiece changed pop culture


The original science fiction blockbuster, Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" is a high-water mark in the late silent era. Released in 1927, the same year as the first talkie, "The Jazz Singer," it's a parable of class struggle, foregrounding issues that obsessed 1920s audiences and that have persisted through the present: the oppressive scale of modern cities, the exploitation of the lower classes by the powerful, and the allure of technology, which is presented by Lang as something akin to dark magic.

Beyond any of that, "Metropolis" is eye candy, bankrolled by its studio, UFA, in hopes of dazzling audiences the world over, and perhaps giving German film some traction in the coveted U.S. market. Lang, among the most sadistic of movie visionaries, led hundreds of designers and craftspeople and tens of thousands of extras to push analog filmmaking to its conceptual limits (and his insistence on doing dozens of takes of certain scenes pushed his collaborators to their physical limits). "Metropolis" was the most expensive film made up until that time. But as studio bean counters still say, every penny (or Deutsche Mark) is on the screen.

Paramount, the film's U.S. production partner, severely cut "Metropolis" so that theater exhibitors could schedule more showings per day. Film scholars’ 80-year quest to find and restore the excised material ended last week when a 25-minutes-longer version, which uses recovered and restored footage to flesh out the film's plot and characters and burnish its themes, debuted at New York’s Film Forum.

Film Salon celebrates the pop culture legacy of Lang’s film with the following, highly subjective list of movies that crib from the film's iconic imagery: an elegant female robot born in a storm of man-made lightning; oppressed workers toiling in dingy subterranean factories; a city of Art Deco skyscrapers ringed by elevated train tracks and swarmed by prop planes and zeppelins. Entries are arranged in chronological order by release date.


www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/film_salon/2010/05/15/metropolis_influence/index.html

[wheelspinner]

Another derivation is the music video that Queen did for Radio Ga-Ga, directed by David Mallet, which even incorporated scenes from Metropolis.

[MacBeth]

A few decades ago, my roomie and I had movie parties for our friends. We would go to the library and check out a film and played them on a projector my father gave me. If it was a silent film, either I would play or my friend Mike would play the background music on my piano. Metropolis was among our favorites - and it became required that every time the heroine appeared, we played the song Maria from West Side Story

Actors never had much money, but we always had great parties....the crowds for movie night was crazy !