UK Release Date: 22-11-2010
Price: £22.99/£24.99
UK Certificate: PG
Director: Fritz Lang
Country: Germany
Distributor: Eureka Entertainment

Metropolis: an 84-year-old, 2½-hour long black and white silent movie, with a pretty awful storyline about the conflict between bosses and workers, culminating with the dreadfully naïve moral (later dismissed by Lang as a “fairy tale”), “The mediator between the Head and the Hands must be the Heart”.

But visually…

Visually, Metropolis is a masterpiece – one of the most astonishing SF films of all time, even surpassing, in terms of the technology of its day, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The big story, of course, is that this is the longest version to be available since shortly after the film’s première in January 1927, when it was slashed in length, cutt­ing crucial parts of the narrative. Over the decades, there have been several attempts to add back some of the cut material, but it was only when a badly marked 16mm copy of the whole film was discovered in a Buenos Aires film archive in 2008 that this almost-full restor­ation, complete with the re-recorded full original score, was possible.

The 25 minutes of latest addit­ions may be grainy and scratched, but their greatest benefits are adding sense to the plot and boosting the virgin-and-whore characters of Maria/robot Maria, played by the entrancing 19-year-old Brigitte Helms. In this splendid DVD release, a 55-minute documentary and a 56-page booklet add even more value.

Metropolis was the most expens­ive silent movie ever; made with models and mirrors, multiple cameras in multiple versions of the set, and with many thousands of extras playing the worn-down workers marching to and from their work.

It is the architecture of both the city and the machines within it which have become the iconic visual images. But for me the scenes that stick in the mind are the slowly marching men; the orchestrated frenzy of their work; Freder’s visions of Moloch and of the Seven Deadly Sins; robot Maria’s erotic dancing, which drives the rich young men crazy; Freder’s delirium and disintegration when he sees his father with her; robot Maria’s manic look as she incites the workers to destroy the city – and their manic dancing once they have done so. This groundbreaking SF film isn’t just a naïve (and often high camp) diatribe about the exploitation of the masses (though it is that); it’s also an astonishing study of both personal and mass madness, compulsion and delusion.