Metropolis (1927) on Netflix
In Metropolis, wealthy planners live in towers above while workers toil below. Freder Fredersen, the city master's son, follows Maria, who preaches that a mediator will unite head and hands.
- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb8.2/10203,137 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
In the future city of Metropolis, the wealthy live in luxury in the towers while workers labor underground to keep the machines running. Freder Fredersen, son of the city master Joh Fredersen, idles in a pleasure garden until Maria arrives with a group of workers' children. Infatuated with her, he follows her down into the machine halls, where a machine explodes, killing and injuring workers. His father defends the workers' conditions as normal. Grot, guardian of the Heart Machine, brings Joh maps found on dead workers, and Joh fires his assistant Josaphat for not reporting the news first. Freder rebels by taking the place of an exhausted worker at the machines. Joh takes the maps to the inventor Rotwang, and Maria preaches in the catacombs that a mediator will unite the head and the hands.
Cast
- Erwin Biswangeras 11811 - Georgy
- Grete Bergeras Working Woman (uncredited)
- Olly Boeheimas Working Woman (uncredited)
Show all 20 cast
- Gottfried Huppertzas Man Playing Violin (uncredited)
- Rose Lichtensteinas Working Woman (uncredited)
- Hanns Leo Reichas Marinus (uncredited)
- Arthur Reinhardtas Working Man (uncredited)
- Henrietta Siodmakas Working Woman (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Metropolis (1927)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
For the climactic scene in which the false Maria is burnt at the stake, Fritz Lang insisted on using real fire, which set actress Brigitte Helm's dress alight, and he had extras throw themselves towards powerful jets of water while filming the flooding of the workers' city.- For the flooding of the workers' city, Brigitte Helm and 500 children from the poorest districts of Berlin had to work for 14 days in a pool of water that Fritz Lang intentionally kept at a low temperature.
- Metropolis shot for 17 months, with 310 shooting days and 60 shooting nights, and by the time shooting finished its budget had leapt to 5.3 million Reichsmarks, over three and a half times the original budget.
- Sculptor Walter Schulze-Mittendorff built the Maschinenmensch robot around a whole-body plaster cast of Brigitte Helm, using a chance-found sample of "plastic wood" so the costume looked metallic yet allowed some movement; Helm got cuts and bruises in it.
- Effects expert Eugen Schüfftan created the Schüfftan process for Metropolis, in which mirrors make actors appear to be occupying miniature sets; the technique was seen again two years later in Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail.
- In 2001, Metropolis was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World International Register, the first film ever to be given that distinction.
- Parufamet commissioned American playwright Channing Pollock to shorten Metropolis for American audiences; he removed all references to the character Hel because the name sounded too like the English word Hell, removing Rotwang's motivation for building his robot.
- Fritz Lang cast two unknowns with little film experience as his leads: Gustav Fröhlich, who had worked in vaudeville and started on the film as an extra before Thea von Harbou recommended him, and Brigitte Helm, who made her feature debut after a screen test.
