Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris)

by Steven Erikson

  Why is Metropolis important, and still worthy of attention and respect? Here are a few reasons from many. Its portrayal of a future embodying a parallel utopia and dystopia, both flawed; the beguiling eroticism of Brigitte Helm’s robotrix; the stunning visuals; the film’s technical innovations, which surely made it the Citizen Kane of sf movies; its heritage. Metropolis is idiosyncratic, epic, metaphorical, dynamic, human, and above all, dizzyingly imaginative.

  If anything, its status grows the nearer we come to the real 2026.

  FRAU IM MOND

  (Director: Fritz Lang; starring: Alfred Abel, Gustav Frölich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Brigitte Helm - 1929)

  Christopher Burns

  By the late 1920s Fritz Lang had already directed a series of lengthy, innovative and near-delirious films, several of them masterpieces. He had explored myth, criminality, and a totalitarian future in Dr Mabuse der Spieler, Die Nibelungen, Metropolis and Spione. Now, in the last days of silent cinema, he was to make what is generally recognised as the first serious science fiction movie. Its predecessors had been Méliès – inspired pantomimes; Frau Im Mond was to redefine and reinvent a genre.

  Lang’s film uses familiar plot formulae to aid its depiction of moral choice: it is therefore comparable to both the classic Western and the Hitchcock thriller. Although the script is officially credited solely to his wife, Thea von Harbou, she and Lang collaborated on its narrative of courage, loyalty, and betrayal.

  Wolf Helius, a man with the face and integrity of a clubland hero, will fly to the moon in the rocket he has designed. His team consists of his unstable assistant Windegger, the eccentric Professor Manfeldt and his pet mouse, and the student astronomer Friede, Windegger’s fiancée. Helius loves Friede but does not realise his desperation, although his naming of the rocket after her is a bit of a give-away. Attractive, chaste and trustworthy, Friede provides an unexpected emphasis in the film when, under acceleration, her body has paroxysms that would have fascinated Freud. Evil financiers also force a man called Turner onto the mission. Those who see the film as a simple adventure should note that we never find out his real name, that he uses the gestures of a demagogue, and that he sports a Hitler haircut. Naturally, there is also a boy stowaway whose fascination with SF comics provides visual intertextuality.

  Veterans of Spione took the major roles, but Lang also needed production values that would convince his audience. He therefore recruited as technical advisers Hermann Oberth (who gets a screen credit) and Willy Ley (who does not – unlike the professor’s mouse). Along with Werner von Braun both men were authorities on the development of rocket propulsion. Oberth and Ley’s input ensured that the technological aspects of Frau Im Mond were so believable that eventually the Nazis banned the film. Even the model rocket was destroyed, as its design was believed to prefigure that of the V2.

  After eighty years, Lang’s lunar voyage still impresses. Several aspects are glaringly incorrect, such as the launch from within water, but in principle if not detail the resemblance to early NASA missions is remarkable. Helius’s rocket is moved out of a massive hangar on a gigantic trailer. The crew travels in a chamber on top of the assembly. Boosters are designed to fall back to earth when their fuel is exhausted. And there is a countdown to launch. Invented purely to increase dramatic tension, a countdown became standard protocol for every succeeding rocket launch, imaginary or real. Few who now hear one can be aware of its origins.

  Frau Im Mond’s apparent authenticity does not last beyond the landing, although at first all appears well. The moonscape is a studio backdrop of jagged mountains; sand trucked in from the Baltic coast is heaped in huge dunes in the foreground; the spacesuits have lead soles (actually cork) to compensate for low gravity. But even though it had been established since at least 1837 that the moon does not possess an atmosphere, the script invents one for its far side. Lang and von Harbou allow their astronauts to walk the lunar surface, and even dress, as if they were exploring the foothills of the Alps. When the means of detecting gold turns out to be a hypersensitive dowsing rod, scientific plausibility has all but vanished.

  One should not be too shocked. Fact, speculation and invention entwine in all of Lang’s films. Like the busiest nineteenth century novelist he explores and exploits the vigour and flexibility of his chosen form, so that everything is filmed with confident brio. Lang specialises in explorations of architectural space, in Expressionistic shadows and lighting, in choreographed flurries of action in front of a static camera. He even allows his actors to stare deep into the lens. Frau Im Mond is a conflicted film, both convincing and absurd, measured yet giddy, rigorous yet deranged. It is, in other words, distinctively Fritz Lang.

  He had only a few years left in the German film industry. Lang’s political astuteness and the contrasting views of his wife had given tension and ambiguity to their work, but by the time of the 1931 shooting of the crime drama M they had agreed to separate. Two years later Thea von Harbou was an active member of the Nazi party and Lang’s new film, Das Testament des Dr Mabuse, had been banned.

  Lang fled to France and then to Hollywood, where he was to spend the rest of his working life hustling for movie projects. Although responsible for films such as The Big Heat, whose moral complexity is still not fully appreciated, he was never again able to be as expansively ambitious as he had been in Germany. And he was never again allowed to make a science fiction film.

  Everyone involved with Frau Im Mond also had to make a choice. Willy Ley also fled, first to Britain and eventually to New York. Most actors, however, reached an accommodation with the Reich by keeping quiet and choosing undemanding roles. Often those who did enjoyed a career revival after the war, but some were not so wise. One was seen at parties hosted by Goebbels; another fled to make films in the Soviet Union and subsequently denounced his colleagues in a Stalinist purge. Von Harbou paid for her beliefs in a de-Nazification programme after the war, but her work never regained the acceptance she had once shared with Lang.

  Hermann Oberth also remained in Germany, eventually joining his old student von Braun in the development of the V2. As a nod to Frau Im Mond, the rocket had an image painted on its side of a woman seated in a crescent moon. After 1946, their wartime intention of obliterating London conveniently overlooked, both men were recruited to develop ballistic missile systems in the USA. Less than a quarter of a century later, and thanks in large part to their pioneering work, a man stood on the surface of the moon.

  The actress who played Friede had died a little under a year before that first landing. Oberth, however, was still alive, as were the actors who played Helius, Turner, Windegger and the stowaway boy. Fritz Lang, too, was able to watch the grainy television transmission from a surface he had only imagined.

  Frau Im Mond ends with two of its characters left there, awaiting rescue. The film’s implication is that the moon will soon be colonised. In 1969 Lang, his colleagues, and most of the world must have thought this would actually happen. But the moon has been abandoned. Despite plans tentatively sketched by NASA and others, it seems probable that it will not be visited again for decades, and possibly never. A woman leaves her footprints in the lunar dust only in our imagination, in fiction, and on the screen. In a film made in Germany more than eighty years ago such a woman stares directly at us through the camera lens. Her steady gaze comes not only out of the past, but also from a future that has disappeared from our ambition.

  THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT

  (Director: Alexander Mackendrick; starring: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenwood, Cecil Parker, Michael Gough - 1951)

  Brian Stableford

  The greatest science fiction film ever made rarely features in genre lists because it appeared, at the time, to belong to an entirely different genre and was never afflicted by a label that could only have harmed its reputation. In 1951 ‘science fiction’, in the context of cinema, was virtually synonymous with ‘monster movie’; in Hollywood terms, this was the year of The Thing From Another World, when The D
ay the Earth Stood Still seemed to be a significant sophistication of a trashy formula that had been intellectually putrescent before it was born. Such crude melodramatic fare was a world away from the fundamentally polite and rather unassuming world of British ‘Ealing comedy’, where extraordinary things happened in a rather quaint fashion that was routinely underplayed, not only for the sake of ironic humour but for the piquant rewards of delicate poignancy.

  Alec Guinness plays Sidney Stratton, an ambitious chemist labouring tirelessly – without the knowledge of his employer, and not without personal risk – to produce a new cloth that will be imperishable and stain-free. As a Utopian idealist, Sidney sees this prospect as a small but significant step in scientific and social progress, which will make life easier for the poor, but his employer, Michael Corland (Michael Gough) is furious when his unexpected discovery of Stratton’s apparatus spoils his attempt to obtain a business loan from fellow mill-owner Alan Birnley (Cecil Parker), and fires him. Sidney then finds another opportunity to carry on his clandestine research in Birnley’s own mill, where he achieves his first success.

  The film’s real subject is the variety of reactions to Sidney’s apparent success. His landlady, Mrs. Watson (Edie Marin), who ‘takes in washing’ to make ends meet, is not so sure that the end of laundry will be a boon to her. Birnley is slower on the uptake, but his fellow mill-owners, led by Sir John Kierlaw (Ernest Thesiger, far more menacing than he had been in The Bride of Frankenstein) immediately perceive the threat to their business model. Birnley’s employees also realise, somewhat belatedly, that their own economic fortunes, along with those of their entire industry, are closely bound to the logic of built-in obsolescence. The moment the innocent scientist becomes a hero, in scientific terms, he becomes a pariah in the eyes of his fellows; all previous sympathy turns to hostility. When attempts to buy him off directly fail, the capitalists offer Birnley’s lovely daughter Daphne (Joan Greenwood) a small fortune to seduce his co-operation, but she has already formed a perverse affection for him, and the fearful are forced to turn to their invariable last resort: violence.

  Daphne provides a calm centre to the riot of anxiety surrounding the prospect of a threat to the supposedly-precious status quo; she not only conserves sympathy for the luckless hero but also attempts to provide a voice of sanity – a task for which Greenwood’s famously husky voice is perfectly designed. Alas, there is only so much that sympathetic sanity can do in confrontation with a whirlwind of fear, and the march of progress eventually has to stumble in order to protect the unimaginative from the terrors of adaptation. In a different era, a female voice of sanity might have pointed out that the factory workers’ fears, if not the washerwoman’s, were quite groundless, but in 1951 – while memories of the cataclysmic disruptions of World War II were still very sore and wartime rationing had not yet ended in Britain – no one realised that utilitarian concerns would play little or no part in the future economics of the clothing industry, and that new textiles would only increase the power of the evil dictatorship of Fashion.

  The Man in the White Suit makes little use of the camera-trickery that had been the heart of cinematic mendacity since the days of George Méliès – a former stage magician for whom cinema was, in essence, a glorious bag of illusions – but the use it does make, in the clever illumination of the eponymous white suit, provides the parable with a marvelous core symbol. The brightness of the suit expresses its promise perfectly, and when its wearer is forced to flee, attempting to preserve that hopeful glow from the brutal panic of the mob, the paradoxicality of everyday attitudes to progress is neatly encapsulated in visual form. The sound effects of Sidney’s apparatus now seem stereotyped, but they were unusual enough in 1951 to be adapted into the backing track of a novelty pop song. The film is perfectly adapted to monochrome; it could not work nearly so well in colour. When the chase sequence reaches its climax, the fate of the suit provides a telling image of the ironic imbalance and fluctuation of hope for the future: a kind of narrative move that can only be achieved in cinema, but which is all too rarely seen in science fiction movies.

  The Man in the White Suit is the greatest science fiction film ever made because it is not about imaginary bogey-men and it does not play fast and loose with casual impossibilities whose momentary plausibility rests entirely in the movie camera’s ability to lie. It is actually about science, and about the social role of science; it is about the kind of progress that goes on routinely in a technologically-developed society, and why the thrust of such progress is not cost-free, to the extent that it sometimes appears to be a double-edged sword. It is an authentically dramatic film rather than an artificially melodramatic one, whose observation and tacit commentary is all the saner for being witty and ironic rather than overblown or hysterical. The script (adapted by Roger Macdougall from his stage play White Suit, with assistance from director Alexander McKendrick – his cousin – and John Dighton) is deft, the acting brilliant and the setting perfect. It is a film very much of its time, but its relevance is by no means limited to that era; like the white suit itself, its fundamental theme is everlasting, and needs no laundering.

  WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

  (Director: Rudolph Maté; starring: Richard Derr, Barbara Rush, Peter Hansen, John Hoyt - 1951)

  Paul Meloy

  According to some, in the year 2012, Planet X, otherwise known as Nibiru or Wormwood, will pass between the Sun and the Earth on its wandering 3,600 year orbit causing global catastrophe and a reversal of the magnetic poles. Or probably not. But the point is this: I enjoy a bit of zeitgeist, so when Mark asked if I would like to contribute an essay about my favourite science fiction film, I thought I’d have another look at When Worlds Collide, a 1951 film based on the novel by Philip Gordon Wylie and Edward Balmer. The movie was directed by Rudolph Mate and was the winner of the 1951 Academy Award for special effects. It’s not as sophisticated or sinister as The Day the Earth Stood Still, nor is it as iconic and inventive as Forbidden Planet, but for an old 50’s cold war offering, it takes a lot of beating. I watched it first in black and white on a small TV, with the light switched off, sitting in the flickering argent with my dad, who adored these kinds of films and introduced me to a whole slew of thrilling, scary, wonderful old movies as a little boy.

  Every now and then, there would be a ‘sci-fi season’ and a few of these old numbers would be run out: Village of the Damned, War of the Worlds, The Quatermass Xperiment, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, The Day of the Triffids. Fantastic stuff! I still love them. Collectively, that is. I still love Them! too. But not more than When Worlds Collide. Here it is:

  In the film, astronomers discover that a red dwarf star is hurtling towards Earth on a collision course. It will impact in about eight months. There’s hope: Bellus is carrying with it a companion planet, Zyra, which will pass by the Earth a few days before Bellus arrives. The scientists and astronomers predict that it might settle into a stable orbit around the sun. And be capable of supporting life. Well, it’s all they’ve got!

  Scientists make square-toed, donnish speeches and grapple with the problem of designing a spaceship capable of carrying a handful of survivors to Zyra using little other than Art Deco and dicey aerospace engineering. This is to be financed by a ruthless wheelchair-bound industrialist called Stanton, keen to use his money to buy himself a seat on the new Ark. While the United Nations scoffs and calls them crackpots, preparations are made.

  There are good, solid performances from the cast, namely Danny Kaye-lookalike Richard Derr as pilot David Randall, Peter Hansen as Dr Tony Drake and Barbara Rush as Joyce Hendron. Joyce is enmeshed in a protracted and seemingly tacit engagement to Tony Drake as the film begins but the arrival of the roguish and rangy flyboy Dave Randall creates a dichotomy for young Joyce; despite the threat of an impending planetary collision, Joyce summons the emotional resources to fall in love with Randall, and rather coldly ditches the doc. Apart from a bit of tension at the beginning, Tony and Dave are blokeish and decent
about the whole thing, which is resolved nicely at the end when the doc confabulates an excuse to get Randall on board the ship despite Randall’s misgivings about his worthiness. I’m not sure I would have been as reasonable in his position.

  The film is shot in Technicolour and there are some strikingly posed Rockwellian tableaus of American folk sitting around their radios listening to the announcement heralding the end of the world. The only scene that lets the film down a bit is at the end, when the survivors emerge onto a sub-Disneyesque matte panorama after their landing on Zyra. They seem to have crashed into the opening frame of a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

  The best scenes are still as I remember them: the anticipation as Zyra makes its approach then thunders past the Earth; the sight of Bellus horrific and vast in the sky above the mountains as it grows inexorably closer; and for me, best of all, the understated, almost offhand calendrical countdown to obliteration pinned to the wall of the workshops: THREE DAYS UNTIL ZYRA; NINETEEN DAYS UNTIL BELLUS.

  It’s science fiction for the layman. There is no hard science, it’s all about story, and how people react when confronted with an event of bowel-cringing finality. Brian Aldiss is of the opinion that two main streams flow through science fiction, the scientific and the whimsical – he calls them the empiric and the runcible. When Worlds Collide blusters gravely through the technicalities with a deadly serious expression but its best bits are subtle, mesmerising and imprint themselves on the memory because they are unselfconsciously effective. There’s no message, either hidden or forced, in these scenes, no laboured exposition; just a grand portrayal of apocalypse beautifully rendered. It’s why it got the Oscar.