Lost original cut of Metropolis found
Many of you sci-fi buffs will have already watched Fritz Lang’s seminal 1927 masterwork, Metropolis, several times over, but now you have an excuse to watch it again. An original cut of the film has been found in a vault in an Argentine museum and it features 25 extra minutes (taking the film’s new length to a butt-numbing 150 minutes) of unseen footage.
The film was truncated at release because the original cut received less than positive reviews from the press during an advance screening (one of which was penned by sci-fi uber-mind, H.G Wells). As such, both the American and German distributers of the film decided to make savage cuts to the original reel, rendering the film choppy and with odd narrative jumps which did nothing to help audiences grasp Lang’s grand, toweringly ambitious achievement.
The film in its current state apparently makes much more sense and there’s plenty more of Lang’s sumptuous imagery to devour too. Film historians and archivists are calling this one of the greatest discoveries of film – the holy grail of lost film from its era.
Now that the full version of the film is firmly in the hands of loved up celluloid fanatics, you can be sure a BluRay deluxe edition will drop sometime in the future – hopefully before any metallic femmebots run amok making symbolic gestures about the plight of the proletariate – hopefully we can delay that particular future for as long as possible.
It seems that they are always finding new material from this film. When they did the version with the rock soundtrack they also included some stills from ‘lost’ footage and photos from the set. I’ve always loved the film and look forward to seeing the additional scenes.
We saw this at the beautiful Senator Theatre in Baltimore earlier this summer right before it was forced out of the hands of the original family owner. We actually saw it twice, the second time with a live score accompaniment. I was blown away by how much watching it with the restored scenes changed the whole feeling and impact of the movie. And, yes, it was also easier to understand and follow. See it in a wonderful old theatre if you are lucky enough to still have one in your area.