'Metropolis' found!

Okay, so you’ve seen every director’s cut of Blade Runner, but how about Metropolis, the film Blade Runner wishes it was? For the last 80 years, Metropolis has been available only in truncated versions, with as much as a fourth of Fritz Lang’s original cut thought lost. Now, however, most of what was trimmed from the 1927 silent sci-fi epic has been found and is about to be restored, so we’ll be able to see the closest version possible to Lang’s original vision. I’ll let GreenCine Daily tell you the whole story, but suffice it to say that this is huge, one of the greatest finds in film history (the only comparable thing might be if someone were to find the missing hours of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed or the hour lopped off of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons). I’m thrilled, and I can’t wait to see the restored version. (Of course, even the extant version is still a masterpiece that you must see at least once in your lifetime, if only to recognize how much every sci-fi and Tim Burton film you love has been influenced by it.)

addCredit(“Metropolis; Everett Collection”)