“Metropolis”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 388, 23 June 1928, Page 25

“Metropolis”

World, A Century from Now !

U.F.A. Classic for Everybody’s

Auckland picturegoers are eagerly aicaiting the screening oj “Metropolis,” the XJJfi.A. film, which has been so much discussed abroad. The German -feature, generally acknowledged to he a classic of the screen, will he filmed at Everybody’s Theatre on Thursday night. The O’Brien management are arranging for a special presentation with the picture. The world a century from note is depicted in “Metropolis.” Towering buildings connected at different levels by traffic viaducts, and with airplanes gliding casually round them, peopled by a race of pleasureseekers and the business men who make their pleasures possible. Below them, buried deep in the earth, an unending vista of gigantic machinery attended by a strange race of broken-spirited beings who live down below with their work and do not know what pleasure is. Such is the condition to which the world will come in another 100 yea”s. according to “Met —- l-opolis.” It is a concept somewhat similar to the world of the future pictured by Wells in “The Time Machine,” but it goes further than he does, and gives a realistic idea of the stage to which science will have brought machinery and electricity.

So advanced mechanically are these people that they have perfected , an automaton resembling man, and so advanced are they in the use of electric energy that they are able to transform that automaton into living flesh and blood. The figure is made at the order of John Masterman, the wealthiest man in Metropolis, in the form of a girl of the working people who has been preaching equality of birth to the slaves of the machines. By his orders she goes down to their meeting-place to preach obedience and subservience. Her maker, Rotwang, however, loses his power to control her, and she preaches class hatred and revolution. She inflames the crowd, who wreck the machines they have tended for so long. The result is that their homes are flooded, and their children, whom they had forgotten, in danger of drowning. They are saved by the intervention of Masterman’s son and Mary, the i girl in whose image the automaton I was made. * Brigette Helm makes Mary a wistful and attractive figure, and the manufactured woman equally attractive in a totally different way; Gustav Frolich as Eric Masterman is a satisfactory lover and helper of the people, whom his father (Alfred Abel) hopes some day to replace altogether by machines. Rudolph Klein-Rogge as Rotwang is also excellent, and Heinrich George as the ursine No. 7 fireman of the Heart Machine gives a remarkably fine performance.