["Metropolis"], for all its thesis and its subtitular dialectic …, is much more akin to the romantic vagaries of "Siegfried" than to the realities of [F. W. Murnau's] "The Last Laugh." For Fritz Lang, who directed both "Siegfried" and "Metropolis," is not a cinema radical…. [He] thinks in terms of sheer visual beauty, composition, and group rhythms rather than of dynamics. He is still of the theater of [Max] Reinhardt in the fluency of his groups and the rhythmic progression of his pageant…. "Metropolis" lacks cinematic subtlety. It is only in the "shots" of machinery in motion and in the surge of the revolutionists that it is dynamic. The camera is too often immobile, the technique that of the stylized theater.

Yet here for the first time the chill mechanized world of the future … has been given reality. Here is the city, that tormented circus of buildings which touch...