𝕳𝖆𝖞𝖘 𝕮𝖔𝖉𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖆𝖉𝖊𝖗

I would imagine that there are far fewer people out there who have read Metropolis the novel than have seen Metropolis the movie. The novel was written by Thea von Harbou, then-wife of director Fritz Lang, who would later go on to write the script for her husband's film. The novel is, I think, important reading material for fans of the film, because it contains a lot of extra context for characters and plot points, and expands upon the story depicted on screen.

I wanted to make a list of some interesting differences between the novel and the movie, which is in no way comprehensive. The novel is available to read for free on Project Gutenberg.

Freder is a mad scientist in his own right

In the movie, Freder Fredersen, our hero, is only ever depicted as a hapless, pampered young man. Friendly, but he doesn't do much aside from desport himself in the pleasure gardens of his father's city and run foot-races with his equally elite friends. He's basically the ultimate under-performing nepo baby.

In the book, Freder is equally hedonistic, but also demonstrates a certain amount of engineering talent in his own right. When the book opens, Freder is seen playing the pipe organ like the tear-streaked little drama llama that he is, before he approaches an unfinished robot that he's been working on.

With a painful, violent jerk, Freder turned around and walked up to his machine. Something like deliverance passed across his face as he considered this shining creation, waiting only for him, of which there was not a steel link, not a rivet, not a spring which he had not calculated and created. The creature was not large, appearing still more fragile by reason of the huge room and flood of sunlight in which it stood. But the soft lustre of its metal and the proud swing with which the foremost body seemed to raise itself to leap, even when not in motion, gave it something of the fair godliness of a faultlessly beautiful animal, which is quite fearless, because it knows itself to be invincible. Freder caressed his creation. He pressed his head gently against the machine. With ineffable affection he felt its cool, flexible members. “To-night,” he said, “I shall be with you. I shall be entirely enwrapped by you, I shall pour out my life into you and shall fathom whether or not I can bring you to life. I shall, perhaps, feel your throb and the commencement of movement in your controlled body. I shall, perhaps, feel the giddiness with which you throw yourself out into your boundless element, carrying me—me, the man who made—through the huge sea of midnight. The seven stars will be above us and the sad beauty of the moon. Mount Everest will remain, a hill, below us. You shall carry me and I shall know: You carry me as high as I wish….” He stopped, closing his eyes. The shudder which ran through him was imparted, a thrill, to the silent machine.

I think it's a horse? This robot never really becomes relevant to the plot, so it makes sense that it was cut for the film. But, I do think that in the novel, it establishes that Freder is natively intelligent and has simply been stunted by his sheltered environment, making his ultimate transition into mediator-hero a little more understandable.

2. The machine-man is more biomechanical than it is purely robotic

The image of the machine-man (or Futura, or robot-Maria, or whatever else you'd like to call it) is probably one of the most iconic images of Metropolis in popular culture. As we all know, it looks like this:

Shiny. Metallic. Gold in the posters that have color. An art deco android, massively influential on all robots that came after.

In the book, however, the robot (here, Rotwang calls it "parody") is described as being almost biomechanical in appearance, with a supple synthetic skin and a pale, cold look.

A hand grasped along, by his head, a graceful, skeleton hand. Transparent skin was stretched over the slender joints, which gleamed beneath it like dull silver. Fingers, snow-white and fleshless, closed over the plan which lay on the table, and, lifting it up, took it away with it. Joh Fredersen swung around. He stared at the being which stood before him with eyes which grew glassy. The being was, indubitably, a woman. In the soft garment which it wore stood a body, like the body of a young birch tree, swaying on feet set fast together. But, although it was a woman, it was not human. The body seemed as though made of crystal, through which the bones shone silver. Cold streamed from the glazen skin which did not contain a drop of blood. The being held its beautiful hands pressed against its breast, which was motionless, with a gesture of determination, almost of defiance. But the being had no face. The beautiful curve of the neck bore a lump of carelessly shaped mass. The skull was bald, nose, lips, temples merely traced. Eyes, as though painted on closed lids, stared unseeingly, with an expression of calm madness, at the man—who did not breathe.

This corpse-like robot is somewhat more logical than a hard mechanical one in the sense that it is easier to imagine how it might be transformed into something resembling a person; I always wondered, watching Metropolis, how the heavy-looking robot could be turned into a fairly slender-looking woman convincingly. But the image of the gold machine-man is so iconic that it's hard to imagine Metropolis without it.

3. The "Seal of Solomon" (aka "Is Rotwang Jewish?")

In the movie, there is a large pentagram on the wall in Rotwang's workshop, giving him a vaguely Satanic air; part scientist, part wizard.

In the novel, the symbol on Rotwang's wall (and his doors) is consistently described as a "Seal of Solomon," a star that may have five or six points, attributed to the biblical King Solomon in the middle ages. This raises an interesting question: was Rotwang intended to be Jewish in the original story? The Seal of Solomon is used within broader western occult and alchemical contexts, but has and continued to be particularly associated with Judaism, and surely von Harbou would have been aware of that connotation.

The house, in the novel, is attributed to an earlier magician who built the house many decades before the city had sprung up around it. This magician came from the east, and supposedly spread the plague with him (a longstanding accusation leveled against European Jews).

It was said that a magician, who came from the East (and in the track of whom the plague wandered) had built the house in seven nights. But the masons and carpenters of the town did not know who had mortared the bricks, nor who had erected the roof. No foreman’s speech and no ribboned nose-gay had hallowed the Builder’s Feast after the pious custom.

Rotwang also notes that the magician was not a Christian.

As a corpse he looked peaceful and Christian-like, both of which he certainly was not in his life.

Rotwang is similarly described as a foreigner, who left the house unchanged when he moved in:

One day there came to the town a man from far away, who saw the house and said: “I want to have that.”

If Rotwang (and/or the magician with whom he is associated) is implied to be Jewish, then it makes his construction of the machine-man arguably more interesting, almost like a science-fiction play on the story of the golem.

4. September

September is the proprietor of the Yoshiwara nightclub, and is entirely absent in the movie. September is mixed-race, a fact which is given great detail in the novel:

The proprietor of Yoshiwara used to earn money in a variety of ways. One of them, and quite positively the most harmless, was to make bets that no man—be he never so widely travelled—was capable of guessing to what weird mixture of races he owed his face. So far he had won all such bets, and used to sweep in the money which they brought him with hands, the cruel beauty of which would not have shamed an ancestor of the Spanish Borgias, the nails of which, however, showed an inobliterable shimmer of blue; on the other hand, the politeness of his smile on such profitable occasions originated unmistakably in that graceful insular world, which, from the eastern border of Asia, smiles gently and watchfully across at mighty America.

His character is another understandable omission, as there is little directly important that he does in the plot. However, it does indicate that the city-state run by Joh Fredersen does interact with other countries in this dystopian future.

5. Josaphat straight up kills a guy

In the movie, Josaphat's role is basically limited to being Freder's right-hand guy, his only ally in his battle to save Maria. In the novel, he gets an expanded plot-line that includes him being sent away from the city in a light aircraft on Joh Fredersen's orders. As the plane leaves the city, flying over large fields which ring the city-state's urban core (the only indication of what lies outside of the city itself), Josaphat freaks out and demands to go back. When the pilot refuses, he clobbers him to death with a tool and ejects from the plane, being rescued by a passing peasant girl.

Yes, he lay there now, stretched out at his length on his back, and the silk which was so strong as to have borne him tore under the grip of his fingers. And where his fingers lost hold of the silk, to find another patch which they could tear, there remained moist, red marks upon the stuff, such as are left behind by an animal that had dipped its paws into the blood of its enemy. The girl was silenced by the sight of these marks. An expression of horror came into her face, but, at the same time, an expression such as mother-beasts have when they scent an enemy and do not want to betray themselves nor their offspring in any way. She clenched her teeth together so forcibly that her young mouth became quite pale and thin. She knelt down beside the young man and lifted his head into her lap. The eyes opened in the white face which she was holding. They stared into the eyes which were bending over them. They glanced sideways and searched across the sky. A rushing black point in the scarlet of the westerly sky, from which the sun had sunk…. The aeroplane…. Now it had indeed carried out its will and was flying towards the sun, further and further westward. At its wheel sat the man who would not turn back, as dead as could be. The airman’s cap hung down in shreds from the gaping skull, on to the bull-like shoulders. But the fists had not lost hold of the wheel. They still held it fast….

6. The flood can talk

In the movie, the flood is just a flood. It's not personified, it just exists as an obstacle for the protagonists to escape.

In the novel, the flood actually starts talking to Maria (probably as a hallucination), and seems to represent a manifestation of her fears. It tants her inability to save the children she had nurtured, and seems to lust after her in a way not unlike how Rotwang evidently lusts for her.

The water quoth: “Do you know, beautiful Maria, that I am fleeter than the fleetest foot? I am stroking your sweet ankles. I shall soon clutch at your knees. No one has ever embraced your tender hips. But I shall do so, and before your steps number a thousand more. And I do not know, beautiful Maria, if you will reach your destination, before you can refuse me your breast.... “Beautiful Maria, Doomsday has come! It is bringing the thousand-year-old dead to life. Know, that I have flooded them out of their niches and that the dead are floating along behind you! Do not look round, Maria, do not look round! For two skeletons are quarrelling about the skull which floats between them—swirling around and grinning. And a third, to whom the skull really belongs, is rearing up within me and falling upon them both.... “Beautiful Maria, how sweet are your hips.... Is the man whom you love never to find that out? Beautiful Maria, listen to what I say to you: only a little to one side of this way, a flight of stairs leads steeply upward, leading to freedom.... Your knees are trembling ... how sweet that is! Do you think to overcome your weakness by clasping your hands? You call upon God, but believe me: God does not hear you! Since I came upon the earth as the great flood, to destroy all in existence but Noah’s ark, God has been deaf to the scream of His creatures. Or did you think I had forgotten how the mothers screamed then? Have you more responsibility on your conscience than God on His? Turn back, beautiful Maria, turn back! “Now you are making me angry, Maria—now I shall kill you! Why are you letting those hot, salty drops fall down into me? I am clasping you around your breast, but it no longer stirs me. I want your throat and your gasping mouth! I want your hair and your weeping eyes! “Do you believe you have escaped me? No, beautiful Maria! No—now I shall fetch you with a thousand others—with all the thousand which you wanted to save....”

7. Joh Fredersen's mother

Finally, Joh Fredersen's elderly mother is present in the novel, while in the movie, the character does not appear. This is actually a significant change, I think, because Mrs. Fredersen is the only character in the book who does not treat Joh Fredersen as a superior; she talks to him honestly, criticizes him, and he is emotionally open around her. The most notable example of this is how the novel ends.

While in the movie, it ends with Freder making Fredersen and Grok shake hands, an ending that has sometimes been criticized for its simplistic outlook on labor relations, in the book, Fredersen goes to his mother's house. She gives him a letter from Fredersen's dead wife, Hel, that she tells him that she has been keeping for many years. Fredersen reads the letter, which says,

“I am going to God, and do not know when you will read these lines, Joh. But I know you will read them one day, and, until you come, I shall exhaust the eternal blissfulness in praying God to forgive me for making use of two Sayings from His Holy Book, in order to give you my heart, Joh. “One is: ‘I have loved thee with an everlasting love.’ The other: ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world!'

Fredersen contemplates this for a moment, looking out the window at the sky. The novel ends,

His heart, utterly redeemed, spoke stilly within him: “Unto the end of the world.... Unto the end of the world.”

Thought I'd list some hidden gems and hidden not-gems that are available for free on YouTube in decent quality, at least in the United States. I've found that older movies are really a mixed bag when it comes to availability; sometimes, they're easily available for free, because the copyright has lapsed and there's no interest in re-asserting rights to the work. Other times, the lack of interest in the work means that it's never been made available online to begin with.

5. El Fantasma del Convento "The Phantom of the Monastery" (1934), Spanish, with English Subtitles

An underappreciated movie, at least among English-speaking audiences, El Fantasma del Convento is a seminal work of early Mexican horror. The plot of the movie is quite simple; three friends --husband, wife, and husband's best friend-- go for a hike in rural Mexico. There's seemingly some unresolved sexual tension between the wife and the tall, hunky best friend, which her kindly but dull husband hasn't picked up on.

When the group gets lost and decides to shelter in an old monastery, the monks there share a terrifying story of a monk who killed his friend in jealousy over the friend's wife, and was forever damned despite his attempts to seek sanctuary in the monastery. Throughout the rest of the night, the trio wrestle with guilt and lust (and supernatural evil) as the monk's curse seems to act upon them.

Of all of the movies that I'm listing here, this is honestly probably the best movie in terms of both technical skill, narrative tightness, and congruence with modern sensibilities. The story that it tells is both universal (just wanting your friend's sexy wife but feeling bad about it) and bound to the culture of the time and place that it was made; you could basically just consider this Catholic Guilt: the Movie. It draws from other famous horror movies that were released in the early 30s-- at one point, the shadow of a bat appears on the wall, seemingly for no other reason than as an echo of Universal's Dracula (1931). But it also has a style that is quite distinct from American horror movies of the time, including several graphic shots of dead characters that would make the discreet staking in Dracula look positively Victorian.

4. The Crime of Dr. Crespi (1932), English

I've written a little about this movie before, when I was talking about Dwight Frye's lesser-known cinematic efforts. Crime is an hour-long B-movie featuring Frye and early cinema cult legend Erich von Stroheim, who is best-known today for his role as the butler in Sunset Boulevard, but who in the 1920s produced some of the most expensive and audacious dramas of the silent era. Crime is a definite step down for von Stroheim, and maybe the worst movie in his oeuvre on a technical level. (Unfortuntely for poor Frye, I don't think this movie was as bad as it got). The sound in the movie has a tendency to go in-and-out, as if the person with the microphone was meandering around the edge of the set during filming. However, the movie is only an hour long, which means that while it may suck sometimes, it does not suck for a long time.

The film centers on Dr. Crespi (von Stroheim), a doctor who invents a poison that will make someone appear dead for 24 hours, before they awaken. He uses this poison to fake the death of a romantic rival, so that he may marry the man's wife after he has been buried alive. His heroic assistant (Frye) uncovers his scheme, but Dr. Crespi beats and threatens him. Will the good doctor be able to defeat the bad doctor? It's a 1930s horror movie, what do you think?

3. The Great Gabbo (1929), English

I said above that The Crime of Dr. Crespi might be the absolute nadir of Erich von Stroheim's career on a technical level, but another definite low point was his performance in 1929's The Great Gabbo. An extremely strange early talkie, Crime might be worse on a technical level, but Gabbo is difficult to beat in terms of pure, unadulterated weirdness. Additionally, while Crime is a concise hour in length, Gabbo struggles with its pace. Partway through the movie, it turns into an entire stage show with complete musical numbers performed for the benefit of an audience still impressed by new sound technology. Stripping away the chorus lines and ballet dancers, the plot of the movie is quite simple. It's arguably not a true "horror movie," but I will give it an honorary spot on this list, because creepy ventriloquist dummies have become a mainstay of the horror genre.

von Stroheim plays a ventriloquist, Gabbo, who is in love with his assistant, but can only express affection for her through the voice of his doll, Otto. One day, the girl has enough of this and leaves him. He proceeds to mope around with Otto, trying to get her back, but she ends up with a dancer and acrobat instead. In the end, he punches Otto in the face out of frustration, and with his doll broken, he walks off stage and into presumable obscurity, done in by his own hubris.

2. Mr. Wu (1927), Silent, English Intertitles

Right off the bat, Mr. Wu is not the movie for you if you are much put off by white actors pretending to be Chinese people. There's a lot of that in this movie. It's made even more jarring by the fact that most of the extras are actual Chinese people (including the iconic Anna May Wong). Lon Chaney's makeup as "Mr. Wu" is better than, say, Richard Barthelmess' performance as Cheng in Broken Blossoms (1919), but no amount of makeup talent can fundamentally conceal the fact that he's a white guy with stuff on his eyelids. His daughter Nang Ping, played by the French actress Renée Adorée, has light blue eyes that somewhat clash with her characterization as full-blooded Han Chinese, especially when a major plot point of the movie hinges upon her fear of giving birth to a half-white child. But anyway, onto the plot.

Mr. Wu is a mandarin who was given a western education as a boy so that he could have a leg-up in a European-dominated world. He marries a girl in a traditional arranged marriage, who gives birth to a daughter and then immediately dies. Anyone who has watched more than a few Lon Chaney movies knows this set up-- a weirdly large percentage of his pictures seem to feature him as a single father with an overly-possessive, borderline emotionally-incestuous relationship with a rebellious adult daughter. Mr. Wu is no exception; he wants to arrange a good marriage for his daughter, but she runs off and gets pregnant by a handsome white guy whose idea of flirting is telling her that he's "seen her on a fan, or a teacup." Eugh. When Wu finds out, he kills his daughter to avenge the family honor, "in accordance with ancient Chinese custom," then sets out to torture her lover's family in a gruesome revenge plot that makes this movie seem like a very early progenitor of the slasher movie.

This movie is one of those strange silent era films that tries to convey an anti-racist message (that the interracial couple should be left alone in peace) through super racist narrative devices.

White Zombie (1932), English

White Zombie is an odd one. It's the first feature-length zombie film, which took a folkloric/historical concept native to African diasporic populations in the Caribbean and re-packaged it in a way that would appeal to broad American audiences. It's also a prime example of an early indie film, produced by the brother-run Halperin Productions on a budget of $50,000. That went further then than it does now, but still wasn't a lot. And as a film . . . it's not very good.

The plot centers around a naive young American couple who decide to go honeymooning in Haiti (not a great idea then or now, to be honest) at the plantation of Beaumont, who is in love with the wife. As they deal with this love triangle, local voodoo master Murder Legendre (Bela Lugosi, of course) steals the wife's scarf, so that he can enslave her as a zombie. Legendre mostly just stands around and clenches his fists as a means of exerting control over the zombies that he's enslaved. One thing that I've noticed about lesser Bela Lugosi movies is that they tend to use his famously intense gaze to make up for a lack of scripting and budgeting. Legendre seems to spend half the movie staring and making weird clenched-hand gestures. I guess that's more palatable than the Halperins attempting to write "voodoo rituals."

Our nominees for this esteemed award are:

Rudolph Valentino as Sheik Ahmed Ben Hassan in The Sheik (1921)

I know there's a sequel where Valentino plays his own son, also named Ahmed, but I feel like the roles are similar enough that I'm gonna only nominate the guy once.

Bert Lytell as Cassim Ammeh/Raoul Le Breton in A Son of the Sahara (1924)

Ramon Navarro as Jamil Abdullah Azam in The Arab (1924)

Unfortunately, this movie is only publicly available in fragments, but copies do exist in film archives.

Arthur Edmund Carewe as Ramlika in The Song of Love (1923)

Nicolas Rimsky as Prince Soleiman in The Tales of a Thousand and One Nights (1921)

I've also seen this perceived de-evolution of movie visuals ascribed to shifting norms in cinematography; flat lighting allows for easier CGI editing of footage but lacks the visual interest of moody lighting, and the lack of constraints on how much footage is shot (since it costs much more to shoot and develop hours and hours of film footage than it does to shoot digitally) means that directors can film their scenes from multiple angles, sit-com style, which gives them more material to work with but limits the dynamism and compositional focus of specific scenes. I think that all of these points are valid, and contributing factors to why (many, but obviously nowhere near all) modern movies seem to lack the visual "oomph" of older films, but I would like to point out another difference in film-making that I think might go towards explaining why a lot of older movies are so visually vibrant. Under the studio system, even low-budget genre movies released by big studios looked great.

The studio system, for those who aren't aware of the term, is used to describe the system that developed in Hollywood in the 1920s, and lasted until the early 1950s, when anti-trust laws and the emergence of television eroded the power of the major American movie studios. Under this system, the "big five" studios --MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and RKO-- and the "little three" studios --Universal, Columbia, and United Artists-- had an oversized control over the production and distribution of films in the United States. These studios had long-term contracts with their talent and generally used that contractual stability to produce their films entirely "in-house" on backlots owned by the studios.

The studio system is often and justly criticized for its exploitation (financially and personally) of creative talent, as well as its stifling of independent filmmakers and monopolist business practices, among other complaints. But one side effect of this structuring of movie production and distribution is that when these large studios wanted to release quickie low-budget "programmers," (a genre of 60-minute-ish movies largely superceded by television shows) they had all of the physical resources and creative expertise available from larger productions at their disposal.

Take, for example, 1934's The Black Cat, released by Universal. The movie was produced on a budget of $95,745.31, or around $2.3 million in 2025. While there's no strict definition of what makes a movie "low budget," most of the sites that I found when researching this post suggest that a modern movie that comes in under $10 million is "low budget." Others cite a figure of $5 million. Either way, The Black Cat would qualify.

But the set design and the costume design look awesome. There's a physical realism and detail to the scenes that gives the movie a sense of perceptual depth. The spaces that the characters inhabit feel substantial, which gives the movie a sense of substance even if the writing of the movie doesn't actually make a lot of sense. It has mood to it, a sense of visual tone conveyed through the staging. It also benefits, of course, from Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff's presence in the film. Because of the nature of studio contracts, even the hottest talent could find themselves appearing in an otherwise undistinguished movie. That leads me to . . .

The Return of Doctor X (1939) is a movie that I have written about some recently, but I am also going to include it in this post because it is a prime example of a b-movie elevated by the utilization of pre-existing studio resources, material and human. I can't find any data about its budget, but as a 62-minute science fiction movie, it was almost certainly made very cheaply by Warner Bros. The movie is mostly known today as one of star Humphrey Bogart's most hated films; reportedly, when he read the script, he went to studio head Jack Warner's office and threw the script at him and demanded more money. But because he had to honor his contract, he still ended up making it. He was quoted as saying:

"This is one of the pictures that made me march in to [Warner Bros. studio chief Jack L. Warner] and ask for more money again. You can't believe what this one was like. I had a part that somebody like Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff should have played. I was this doctor, brought back to life, and the only thing that nourished this poor bastard was blood. If it had been Jack Warner's blood or [Harry Warner's] or [Sam Warner's] maybe I wouldn't have minded as much. The trouble was, they were drinking mine and I was making this rotten movie."

This demonstrates one of the ugly sides to the studio system-- the control that they had over those under contract to them meant that actors and other talent were beholden to the financial wishes of their employers to an extent sometimes detrimental to their well-being and happiness. But purely from the perspective of a film-watcher, it enabled b-movies to benefit from the talent of overqualified actors. Bogart is really the saving grace of The Return of Doctor X; even at his most resigned, he brings his significant personal magnetism to his role as the mad doctor.

And, again, the physical sets are richly detailed and substantial. The doctor's lab is full of boiling beakers and anatomical specimens.

Sometimes, movies were initially conceived of by "poverty row" studios, who lacked the resources available to the big studios, and then their projects were picked up by the big studios and re-worked.

A good example of this is the 1943 war-propaganda-melodrama Hitler's Madman, started by PRC and finished by MGM. It was based on a then-recent incident in German-occupied Bohemia and Moravia (now Czechia) where resistance fighters gunned down SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, and in turn, the SS massacred the small town of Lidice. The film, featuring John Carradine as Heydrich, was originally going to be a modest melodrama, yet when Louis B. Mayer saw the unfinished film, he liked it so much that he bought the film and arranged for re-shoots on the MGM backlot. As a result, the film gained several new audacious and high-impact scenes, including Heydrich's "personal inspection" of a group of Czech girls, his deathbed, and the destruction of a Lidice set populated with a village's worth of extras. The result is a film with very strong visuals that manages to leave an impact on the viewer not on the strength of its storytelling, but on the strength of its sense of scale. The massacre at the end of the movie involves dozens of extras and life-size sets; its sense of devastation is equally life-sized.

(As someone with an academic background in history, I do feel obligated to mention that Hitler's Madman, while entertaining and moving, is heavily HEAVILY fictionalized. It's really, in my opinion, one of the earliest examples of a nazisploitation film, rather than a "realistic" war movie. But it is also deeply interesting as an artifact of a very specific moment in time).