MIGHTY “METROPOLIS”

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 393, 29 June 1928, Page 14

MIGHTY “METROPOLIS”

STUPENDOUS VISION OF THE FUTURE Has anyone thought seriously of a city of 100 years hence? Hoes anyone living in our age more than wonder vaguely what things will be like in A.H. 2028? Will trains, trams and motor-cars run on overhead railways and roadways? Will airplanes thread their precarious way through intricate avenues of sky-scrapers of a magnitude never conceived even in the United States? Will the city of the future be a gigantic wheel which cannot turn without its driving force, with brain mastering brawn —every man a cog? In “Metropolis,’* the mighty picture of a century hence, which startled the world on its release from the UFA studios last year, all this happens—and more. All air and happiness is above, and the workers live as servile toilers down below. Hundreds of disappointed Aucklanders were turned away from the doors of Everybody’s Theatre last evening, when “Metropolis” commenced its Auckland season. A quarter of an hour before the show was scheduled to start, every seat in the theatre was filled, and the management was courteously regretting that others must wait until later in the session. Those who filled the theatre could not have been disappointed; they may have been puzzled. “Metropolis,” although the product of the human brain, challenges adequate description. Scientists and industrialists will disagree with it as denoting a tendency, but will accept it in the spirit of a warning of what a city of the future should not be. The calculating brain of “Metropolis” is John Masterman, whose god is power, and who has relegated all religious beliefs into the museum of antiquity. His son is inspired with sympathy for the thousands of toilers who go down in huge lifts into the bowels of a factory packed with amazingmachinery producing we know not what —spiritless, Hopeless drudges, tending their machines reluctantly and mechanically. The doctrine of peace and salvation is being preached to the workers by Mary, a girl of their own class, but the brain of Masterman sets the genius of Rotwang, his unscrupulous scientist, to work on a counterpart of Mary to teach the men servility and fortitude. Rotwang creates a mechanical figure, and later captures Mary and transfers her likeness to the mechanical contraption. The result, which is produced in a maze of violent electrical currents and agitated laboratory instruments, is a human being—but without a soul —which spreads a doctrine of destruction, rebellion and evil, and which ultimately brings disaster to the inventor, and leads the Masterman brain to a realisation that the mediator between hand and brain is the heart. The underground factory and the mechanical upheaval is stupendous—no other word will suffice. “Metropolis” runs for a long season. A jungle film from UFA studios and an Empire review supported the big picture. Mr. Hartley Warburton sang two solos, “Bedouin Love Song” and “Cloze-Props,” and was greatly appreciated. A special musical score prepared for Mr. Howard Moody and Everybody’s Orchestra added charm and atmosphere to a mighty programme.