In 1924, master German filmmaker Fritz Lang first caught a glimpse of New York City from the deck of an ocean liner. It was this vision, he claimed, that inspired his landmark 1927 film Metropolis. The Berlin sophisticate was supposedly overwhelmed by the towering architectural splendor and angst-ridden mortal struggle of the city. “I felt it was the crucible of the multiple and confused human forces, with blind men scrambling around in the irresistible desire to exploit one another, thus living in perpetual anxiety,” as he put it. “I knew that I must make a film of all these impressions.”

This often repeated tale isn’t true, of course. Lang and his wife, screenwriter Thea von Harbou, had been at work on the Metropolis screenplay for a quite a while before his New York trip. And their home city of Berlin certainly had no dearth of eye-popping modern architecture. But Lang was a wonderfully effective fabulist and self-mythologizer, and he was always his own best publicist.

We can see aspects of Lang’s supposed vision of New York City operating in the beautiful early scenes of Metropolis, with the hand-built models shot in close-up suggesting a towering futuristic city. The planes shown flying between the skyscrapers would later be referenced in 1982’s Blade Runner, with its awesome film noir representation of Los Angeles. The studio-built sets in Metropolis center on a soaring art deco factory, with a “heart of the machine” that must be maintained by workers stationed on its face, keeping it running in a kind of desperate convulsive dance until the system finally breaks down in bursts of lethal steam, killing dozens of them. Lang concludes this early sequence with a hallucinatory image of the gargantuan biblical demon Moloch imposed over the factory, with workers fed into its insatiable maw.