Film

This film almost demands our highest rating on sheer stature alone. But there’s an important realization to make about Fritz Lang: His movies only get better after Metropolis. Four years later, he would release M, the beginning of the modern serial-killer film and still a procedural with no equal. Fleeing to America in 1934, Lang managed to smuggle cynicism into Hollywood while somehow retaining his signature grandeur (and prickly on-set demeanor). Fury, his 1936 U.S. debut, is a shocking indictment of mob rule, with Spencer Tracy’s best performance. The Big Heat is the noir to end all noirs, even outwilding Wilder with its sudden-death coolness.

So back we go to these bustling future cityscapes and Brigitte Helm’s sexy robot, knowing that without them, there is no Blade Runner. Lang at his best, however, is about more than the wow factor, and this movie’s crude class warfare (workers tend to the machines underground; rulers live in high towers) is hardly profound. Metropolis is superspectacle, essential to understanding how movies can function primarily on craft and atmosphere. (In this sense, it shares a lot with Tod Browning’s mythical megaproduction Dracula, from 1931.) The design is impeccable and still a touchstone of steamy modernism; newbies will recognize not only Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video but also 300’s Spartans in these graphic hordes of charging men. The visionary “Tower of Babel” sequence remains a high point: a perfect minimovie in the larger context and a hint of Lang’s deeper mistrust of humankind. His greater provocations were yet to come; here’s a textbook example of how to set yourself up for the bigger dare.