I was not so politically minded in those days as I am now. You cannot make a social-conscious picture in which you say that the intermediary between the hand and the brain is the heart--I mean that's a fairy tale--definitely. But I was very interested in machines. . . . Anyway I didn't like the picture--thought it was silly and stupid--then, when I saw the astronauts--what else are they but part of a machine? It's very hard to talk about pictures--should I say now that I like Metropolis because something I have seen in my imagination comes true?--Fritz Lang This bizarre film may bewilder some at first, because it is frankly a story of the future, without any modern trick framework to make the usual puerile connection with the average subway straphanger. Its main drift is that the standardizing efficiency of our age,stressing material advancement rather than spiritual progress, carries the seeds of its own destruction in its metallic bossom. To impress this graphically, Metropolis visions a mammoth city of a later century, teeming with mechanical marvels and owned by one callous, superefficient master--who bears . . . haunting suggestion of Henry Ford.--Frank Vreeland No matter what degree of entertainment you derive from Metropolis, you must give it credit for being a great intellectual feat as well as an example of the extraordinary possibilities of the screen. It is to be hoped that some day Erich Pommer will find himself so situated in Hollywood that he can attempt something else equally daring and ambitious.--Welford Beaton The film demonstrates the dangers of the purely architectural-pictorial premise of the German studio film.Metropolis is a series of stunning pictures with the silliest, wateriest intellectual and dramatic paste holding them together.--Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies
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