The year 1927 witnessed the appearance in Germany of the most significant utopian film of the silent era – Metropolis. In the film, director Fritz Lang achieves the realization of his ideas about the possible future organization of society. The introductory sequences present this social organization in a very attractive light. In a magnificent, gigantic city with gleaming skyscrapers, suspension bridges, and bustling street, people live in comfort and plenty, with every possibility for intellectual and physical development. However, Metropolis is not a city of freedom and equality. Below ground, working for the chosen elite, are masses of nameless workers who have no more value within the social order than a cog in a machine or a tool or production. It is for this reason that the workers revolt and almost destroy the city; only then is there a reconciliation and an equalization of rights for the two strata, the elite and the workers. Lang honestly believed in this idea of reconciliation, and his attitude to a certain extent reflected the German reality, in which there were growing indications of stabilization and attempts to resolve social problems. But Lang's views on these questions, conveyed finally in the reconciliation of the two classes under the slogan "the heart must serve as intermediary between the brain and the hands," did not sound convincingly progressive, either when the film was made or in the years that followed. Lang himself acknowledged this when, after the Nazi Putsch, Propaganda Minister Goebbels had him summoned: "(Goebbels) told me that years before, he and Hitler had seen my film Metropolis in some small town and that at that time Hitler declared that he would like me to make Nazi films." (Siegfried Kracauer: From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the