One of the most visually thrilling, baffling and technically marvellous films in cinema’s long history gets the ‘director’s cut’ treatment 35 years after Lang died. The reason is a discovery in a small museum in Buenos Aires of 25 minutes of footage long thought to be lost after the original print was butchered by Paramount for the US release. The lost footage has been re-inserted – it is dotted throughout the film rather than one sequence – and as a result some of the visuals are grainier than others.
The other additional feature for this release is the new recording of the original score by Gottfried Huppertz, and newly-translated subtitles which are much clearer than before. It’s a long way from the ghastly release in 1984 which had a Giorgio Moroder score with Bonnie Tyler and Adam Ant, and with the film itself colourised – sacrilege.
All of this adds up to a simply thrilling release, which still marvels on every viewing. Lang’s film is set in a nightmarish future world in which worker drones drive huge, seemingly pointless steam machines while an elite live in beautiful art deco apartments and enjoy decadent lives of leisure. The industrialist Joh Fredersen seems to run the show, but when his son Freder meets a mysterious woman the facade cracks. Freder, a dandy if ever there was one, follows Maria down into the bowels of the machine-driven city and, shocked by the repetitive, soul-sapping labour he sees, starts what is basically a worker’s revolution. When Fredersen gets wind of this he orders a mad inventor to turn his robot into a vision of Maria – the famous transformation scene.
It’s amazing how influential the film has become over the years. Lang’s cityscape, with trains and cars zooming across a giant, glass-fronted tower of Babel, still takes the breath away, as does all of the interior design. Fredersen’s office is a state of the art Art Deco classic and, if his desk still exists, it should be in the Design Museum. Then there’s the robot – has a sexier metal beast ever been seen in the cinema? The opening montage, of the worker drones being replaced, marching heads down along prison-like corridors, is much-imitated but never bettered – this was 1927, for goodness’ sake. Freder’s cry, after taking the place of a drone, of “has 10 hours ever passed so slowly” has been echoed by every factory worker since.
The only criticisms are the corny ending, but that has been generally aimed at Lang’s wife Thea von Harbou for her insistence on a slightly too neat compromise – he divorced her in unhappy circumstances a few years later (presumably not because of the end of Metropolis though). The only other real piece of mud slung at the film was it was one of Hitler’s favourite films. Joseph Goebbels, hugely impressed by Lang’s technical genius, offered him the post of head of film in Germany. Lang said he fled to Paris overnight, but this has been disputed – what is certain is that Lang never took up the role and did eventually flee to America, where he made several classic film noirs. Superb though some of these were, it is perhaps Metropolis that he will always be associated with. Now, with its additional 25 minutes, it makes a lot more sense storywise, and so is as near to Lang’s vision as we are ever likely to get.
Overall Verdict: The definitive version of Lang’s tale, which looks as marvellous and mind-boggling as it must have looked in 1927. An absolute classic.
Reviewer: Mike Martin
