Evening star., 1927-04-17

HAVE recently seen the silliest film. /
do not believe it would be possible to make
one siIlier, and as this film sets out to dis
play the way the world is going. ] think
The Way the World Is Going may well
concern itself with this film. It is called Me.
tropos," it comes from the great Ufa studios
in Germany. and the public is given TO under
stand that il has been produced at enormous
cost 1t gives in one eddying concentration al
most every possible foolishness, cliche patitude
and muddement about mechanical progress ana
progress in general, served up with sauce OF
sentimentality that is all its own
II is a German film, and there have been
some amazingly good German films before they
began to cultivate bad work under cover Of
protective quota, And this film has been adapt
ed to Anglo Saxon taste, and quite possibly II
has suffered in the process, but even when
every allowance has been made for that, there
remains enough to convince an intelligent OBJ
server that most of it's Stiffness must be funda
mental. Possibly / dislike this soupy whirlpool
none the less because I find decaying fragments
Of my own juvenile work Of 80 years ago, The
Sleeper Awakes," floating about in it. Capek's
Robots have been lifted without apology, and
that soulless mechanical monster of Mary Shell
ley's, who has fathered many German inven
tons breeds once more in this confusion.
* < X i
Originality there is none independent thought
none where nobody has imagined for them the
authors have simply fallen back on cotemporary
things. The airplanes that wander about above
a great city show no advance on cotemporary
types though all that stuff could have been
livened up immensely with few heliocopters
and vertical and unexpected movements. The
motor cars are 1925 models or earlier do not
think there is a single new idea, single in
stant of artistic creation, or of inteH
gent anticipation from first to last in the whole
pretentious stew. ] may have missed some
of hYttT r
it must bore the intelligent man in the audi,
ence, makes the film all the more convenient as
a gauge Of the circles of ideas and mentality
from which it has proceeded.
The word Metropolis" says the advertise
ment in English, "in itself is symbolical of
greatness" which only shows us how wise it is
to consult dictionary before making asser-
tions about the meaning Of words. Probably 1t
the adapter that made that shot. The
German ''Neubabelsburg" was better and could
have been rendered New Babel" 1t is a city,
we are told, of about 100 years hence. 1t is rep.
resented as being enormously high, and all the
air and happiness are above. and the workers
live, the servile toilers in blue uniforms sn
The Sleeper Awakes" lived down, down down
below
Now, far away in dear old 1897 it may have
been excusable to symbolic social relations in
this way. but that was 80 years ago, and a
lot Of thinking and some experience intervene.
That vertical city of the future we know now
is, to put it mildly, highly improbable. Even
in New York and Chicago where pressure upon
central sites is exceptionally great, it is only
the central Office and entertainment region that
scars and eXcayates. And the same centripetal
pressure that leads to the utmost exploitation
of the values at the center leads also to the
driving out Of industralism and labor from the
population center to cheaper areas and of resi-
dental life to more open and airy surroundings.
That was all discussed and written about before