Metropolis, Monsters and Marks

The first film I ever saw in the cinema was a landmark - Star Wars. I can still remember that staggering opening with the gigantic spaceship lumbering across the screen, and my dad tells me I stood up through the entire film. At the age of four who knows how much of it I understood but then the dialogue wasn't the point - the visuals were. There's a rule for writing a film script that says that you should imagine the film as a silent movie and work out if the audience could still understand what is going on purely from the pictures, a rule that George Lucas promptly forgot about when he came to make the dire prequels.

The German silent classic Metropolis, which I saw at the Roundhouse with a full orchestra, was made fifty years before even Star Wars, is still one of the most expensive films ever made when inflation is taken into account, and still looks impressive now. The tale of a great mechanised city, and a mad scientist who creates a robot facsimile of the saintly Maria to whip the workers up into revolution - of course the florid acting is dated but the visuals are remarkable, from the iconic design of the robot to the giant machines that power the city and eventually lead to its near downfall.

Mark Gatiss, a geek after my own heart, began an exploration of horror films on BBC4 on Monday. He focused on the real oldies - the Universal Dracula/Frankenstein series which were not my favourites as a lad (I was more of a Hammer man) but it was good to see these comparatively rarely shown films get a championing. Seeing the 1935 Bride of Frankenstein in a prime-time slot was also a bit of a treat - a very eccentric film with, again, some amazing visuals. No doubt the director had seen Metropolis - indeed Brigitte Helm who played Maria was considered for the role of the electricly enlivened Bride.

It was the old films, not modern ones, that got me interested in the cinema in the first place. In the 80s it was common to come home from school and find some old movie - not necessarily a classic, just a good solid entertainment - on BBC2 or Channel 4. How many dinners did I eat sat in front of Basil Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes, or Laurel and Hardy, or the Carry On gang, or even The Man From Uncle? Or I'd video tape the old horror movies that would be shown late on a Saturday or at 2am on a Thursday morning. They didn't scare me even then, but they had a wonderful mix of cheese, charm and imagination that kept me watching.

House of Games at the Almeida in Islington is, in a tenuous link, also based on a (relatively) old film. It's a story of con men and their marks, with a high-flying psychiatrist being drawn into the lifestyle of a group of tricksters who frequent the titular bar. Although in a way the play is a little reminiscent of an upmarket episode of Hustle, it's grippingly acted and although some of the twists and turns are guessable it keeps up a level of tension and wit that's only slightly dampened by a not entirely satisfying ending.