What's the first thing you think of doing when your beloved one dies? Well, if you're a mad scientist, one option might be to replace them with a robot and hope that nobody notices. That's the course of action taken by Rotwang (played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge) in Fritz Lang's science fiction landmark, Metropolis. Klein-Rogge pretty much set the standards for how to portray the mad scientist on the silver screen, his wild-eyed frantic scientist one of the great performances of the silent era. It helps matters considerably that Metropolis is such a groundbreaking movie - just as Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari utilized the expressionistic aesthetic which was so popular in Germany at the time, so too did Fritz Lang draw upon the art movement to inform the look and feel of his film. It's amazing to think that, at the time of its release, Metropolis heavily divided the critics, with many of them lambasting the film as overblown, muddled and far too long. Still, it has more than stood the test of time, while its message about conformity and absolute power is as strong today as it was in 1927.
