As part of a new series, one of our writers finally catches up with the cinematic classic they’ve somehow missed. Today, Stuart Jeffries watches Fritz Lang’s pioneering sci-fi epic
It’s Freddie Mercury’s fault. When he and his lavishly coiffed backing band released Radio Gaga in 1984, the video used footage from the 1927 German expressionist film, Metropolis. Superimposed over Fritz Lang’s visionary cityscape were the foursome in a flying car. Later in the video, they performed a gig before the film’s downtrodden masses. Not many cinematic classics could survive such brutal repurposing. For me, Lang’s film got tainted by association with Queen’s song – one that, ironically enough, became part of the very radio blah it ostensibly indicted.I’ve always loved the films noirs the German emigré made in
Hollywood after the war: The Blue Gardenia, While the City Sleeps, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. I’ve also long doffed the proverbial fedora to Lang for narking both Josef Goebbels and Joseph McCarthy. I’ve even forgiven him for directing Lee Marvin to throw coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face in The Big Heat, one of the greatest films noirs. But throughout my life I stayed away from Metropolis, imagining it to be outdated cardboard sci-fi fit only to be plundered by pomp rock grave robbers.I couldn’t have been more wrong. Metropolis, when I finally watched it recently, seemed not just creatively fresh but amazingly topical. For instance, when Maria’s robotic doppelganger exhorts the masses to rise up from their underground city, her cry resonates down the decades: “Who is the living food for the machines of Metropolis? Who lubricates the machine joints with their own blood? Who feeds the machines with their own flesh?” Her call to revolution now captures, at least for me, our post-Fordist era of Big Data vampires from Fitbit to Facebook.