Film Review
Dharmendra Singh reviews Metropolis (restored version)
Rating: 3/5 stars (1 star = Poor; 2 = Mediocre; 3 = Good; 4 = Very Good; 5 = Exceptional)
There are some films you are forbidden to dislike. Films which, if you’re caught denouncing them, afford you pariah status. Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece, ‘Metropolis’ is undoubtedly one of these.
Set in an industrialised dystopia, characters are either submissive workers, who ensure the constant operation of the city’s ubiquitous machines; or are one of the elite supervisors, headed by the despotic Joh Fredersen (Alfred Abel).
Joh’s son Freder (Gustav Fröhlich) falls for the revolutionary rhetoric of one of the workers, Maria (the ethereal Brigette Helm) and volunteers himself as the mediator who will unite the city’s two classes by way of, well, mediation.
Meanwhile, a zany inventor, Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), convinces Joh that he has created the ‘Maschinenmensch’ (Machine-Man) as the ideal replacement for ‘flawed’ humans.
Joh, not realising Rotwang’s Machiavellian motives, endorses the creation (a precursor to Star Wars’ C-3PO) and adds that it should have Maria’s face to ‘sow discord’, i.e. incite libidinous passions, in those it encounters.
The Machine-Man causes the destruction of the city but is exposed as Maria’s clone, and an armistice between Joh and the workers is realised.
A wonderful job has been done of adding missing footage to the existing version. The result? A much more cogent narrative. And, at around 150 minutes, this is as close to the original 1927 version as we’re ever likely to get – thanks to an Argentinean film museum which inherited an original print after distributors and private collectors had played pass-the-parcel for years.
So, why only 3 stars?
Two things: characters’ insufferable gesticulation, and the question of which Friday night to sacrifice to contend with its two-and-half-hours of pessimism and cacophonous score. Its irony is that many people think this near-full version could easily be truncated.
Of course, I do acknowledge its enduring visceral power and appreciate its obvious influence on world cinema. Perhaps it’s just that in German Expressionism I’ve discovered my bete noire, and as such, must be considered a pariah. So be it.
There is one fantastic anachronism, however: the protagonist is female! And in Germany! And in the 1920s! The statement makes a mockery of today’s supposedly egalitarian age, in which female actors are in a state of limbo about their role in cinema.
If you do get to see this epoch-making film – and if you’re a serious film fan, you shouldn’t still be thinking about it – don’t be put off by the actors” histrionics, or the hackneyed scientific apparatus, or the contrived special effects.
Christopher Harvie
‘Without vision, the people perish’
Plains, Lanarkshire: Photograph by Islay McLeod
I
Once upon a time, when Brendan Behan was out on a motor-boat in Dublin Bay, his father remarked of the big houses under Howth Head, ‘Son, that’s where the rich dastards live.’
‘But da, you usually call them bastards.’
‘Anyone can be born a bastard. To be a dastard you have to work at it.’
As the road quits Forres for Inverness you see on your left a pink granite obelisk, on a bluff over the River Findhorn. Instead of the usual reverence to a local magnate or general, its story is remarkable and touching: of Dr James Thomson, victim of the Crimean War. After the Battle of the Alma on 20 September 1854, the young surgeon didn’t leave with the victorious Anglo-French army, but stayed on the field for three weeks to care for 700 wounded and sick Russians, 400 of whom he returned healthy to their own people, before dying himself.
An instance of Adam Smith’s and later Robert Burns’ ‘sympathy’ in overdrive. How much is this evident in today’s Scotland? Following the collapse of our financial system, supposedly based on the science of more-perfect-markets, I would suggest ‘not a lot’.
II
Gillian Tett of the Financial Times, giving evidence in 2009 to Holyrood’s Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee, was gripping in analysing a ‘shadow banking’ system governed not by science or morality but by tribalism. But she dried up almost completely when asked what these creatures could do in extenuation. Some, she said, with time and money to spare, had indeed taken to philanthropy. But compared to their efforts in other directions – conspicuous consumption above all – this moralisation seemed limited and tentative. It certainly presupposed an incredible leap from Adam Ferguson’s stark world of in-groups and out-groups, in which the materially rich but morally poor were programmed to stay that way.
Think of the Scottish Borders as bankers’ country: the Financial Times with its alluring ‘How to spend It’ in the Melrose shops, streams of pricey four-wheel drives coming over the Moorfoots, the restored manses and muckle ferms awaiting them. In five years I have never met one of their drivers. Sometimes you get an odd glance from up there, like that of a dog caught short on the pavement: shifty-shame and ‘in your face’ mixed. I know one nonconformist financier who spends his spare time gallantly backing risky social and artistic innovation, but our new Nabobs seem a race apart, seemingly content to live in their invisibly-gated community, appalled at the notion of the Borders ever being linked by rail to the central belt.
You can see why gentle Jane Austen disliked Crawfords and Dalrymples. Beneath their flash wealth was exploitation in the East or West Indies. Michael Fry recounts near-feral Scots looting the Inuit or Bengali, George Rosie’s ‘Mysterious Scotland’ carries the story on from Jardine Matheson and opium to the energetic bootlegging of whisky by Scotch distillers to the likes of Al Capone in the Prohibition era. At the millenium the greedy preyed on cancer charities, or football clubs with byzantine finances. Only last month we had a £ 15 million scam perpetrated by the endlessly vocal leaders of Scots inshore fishing, and the less said about the moral economy of the big beast of Scottish heavy industry, BAe, the better.
Could a banking system which handled transactions in an economy perhaps 5% penetrated by criminality and fraud, protect the savings of ordinary citizens? Or was their looting by speculators and the banks’ own greedy dealers programmed? Insider accounts like Geraint Anderson’s ‘Cityboy’ suggest that the latter’s lifestyle – fast cars, sex, drugs, drink, knuckleduster watches – was close to that of footballers, TV celebs and criminals. If this swelled the compulsions of addiction, hard anthropology would suggest the rule of J G Frazer’s ‘Temporary Kings’ out of The Golden Bough. The material and moral results were the same, and in Scotland, more extreme. Overseers of the British press admit they’ve never met anything quite like the Record or the Scottish Sun, with their diet of nasty, brutish and sport.
Seen from the administrative/establishment angle, this seems to work, with football serving as a sort of residual class ritual: ‘feasting with tigers’ at the weekends balances the claims of superjob and cyberworld: not bourgeois but aristocratic-pugilist – the ‘lusso’ style of G M Fraser’s Harry Flashman, and the sportsmen, crooks and rotters surrounding him. ‘Rest and Recreation’ counts more in the economics of West Central Scotland than shipbuilding. Fact.
Courage beyond the point and obdurate pride
Made us a nation, robbed us of a nation.
IV
It was such confusion of values that made Sir Angus Grossart’s comparison of Fred Goodwin of RBS to a Nazi victim so depressing: in Disraeli’s ‘worse than a crime, a blunder’ category. The 1938 Reichskristallnacht was vicious, state-co-ordinated terror. Shying a brick at Chateau Goodwin was trivial vandalism, when the mass of banking’s shareholder-victims – from my Salveson’s lorry-driver brother whose pension-fund was in RBS shares to our luckless National Trust – wanted to see Goodwin either investigated or redeem himself: like Jack Profumo tending London’s East End. Instead Goodwin, Hornby and their confederates were allowed to write off the Scottish financial system and then sidle back with the investment-banking Undead.
We have come to the end of speculation, just when a calculated techno-financial gamble, and courage to suit, is needed to enable us to body-swerve the nemesis of Peak Oil. Corporate spirit, as the banks have demonstrated, can never be superior to enforcing ethics on business. We must – and can – have a renewable, remoralised energy economy, but only if we also manage a new, ascetic ‘political family’. We haven’t any other chance.
Professor Christopher Harvie is SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, a distinguished historian, and has held senior academic posts in both Germany and Scotland
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