All The Myriad METROPOLISes

I don’t think there’s any film that’s been picked apart and stitched back together more times than Friz Lang’s masterpiece, Metropolis.

My love for the movie is unbounded, but it’s a love that came slowly.

For a long time, the only versions available were the US and UK edits, both of which severely truncated the film and robbed it of its balance and complexity, rendering the story virtually incomprehensible.

The main plot:
Jon Fredersen manages the huge technocratic city of Metropolis.  While Fredersen is not a cruel leader, his focus on keeping Metropolis running efficiently keeps him from regarding the living conditions of the workers who make the marvelous city possible.

Maria is a missionary / social worker among the workers who live deep beneath the city, operating its many machines.  She tries to offer them hope while at the same time trying to make the surface elite realize they need to treat the workers more equitably.

While doing this, she encounters Freder, Jon Fredersen’s son.  Freder follows her down to the workers’ level and is horrified by the conditions he sees.  He tries to convince his father to do something about it.

Maria preaches to the workers, offering them hope for justice but also cautioning against violent rebellion that might have disastrous unintended consequences.  Freder contacts her again, and the two fall in love.

Jon Fredersen, not knowing Maria’s desire to prevent a violent confrontation, goes to the scientist Rotwang to see what can be done to neutralize her influence among the workers.  While Rotwang and Jon Fredersen once loved the same woman, she chose Jon Fredersen and bore his son, Freder, but subsequently died.

Jon Fredersen assumes Rotwang has gotten over this long lost love.

Oh No He’s Not…

Rotwang suggests making a robot duplicate of Maria to discredit her among the workers.  Jon Fredersen approves and Rotwang kidnaps Maria, duplicating her in his lab and replacing her with the evil Robot Maria.

As a proof of concept, he shows Jon Fredersen how lifelike Robot Maria appears by having her perform an erotic dance before many of Metropolis’ elite.

As Jon Fredersen gives Robot Maria her final instructions, Freder bursts in, distraught at not being able to locate the real Maria.  He sees his father seemingly in an intimate clinch with Robot Maria and suffers a nervous breakdown.

Rotwang, however, programed Robot Maria not to merely disillusion the workers but stir them up into a nihilistic frenzy that will destroy Metropolis once and for all, his revenge for Jon Fredersen stealing the woman he loved so long ago.

Robot Maria leads the workers in an orgy of violence.  The genuine Maria escapes Rotwang’s lab and links up with Freder to save the workers’ children who are in danger of drowning when their parents’ violent rebellion smashes the machines that kept the lower city from flooding.

The two rescue the children but the real Maria is almost killed by the mob of workers who do not realize the lower city has flooded. 

Fortunately the evil Robot Maria is exposed, the real Maria is saved, and Freder dukes it out with Rotwang to kill him.  The film ends with Freder, under the real Maria’s guidance, acting as a mediator to get the workers and Jon Fredersen to work with one another to rebuild Metropolis while avoiding the social disparity that once contaminated it.

(As noted above, this is the main plot, there are three major subplots involving Josaphat, Jon Fredersen’s assistant who gets demoted to worker status; The Thin Man, Jon Fredersen’s enforcer, who despite working for the ruling elite demonstrates he knows the trues cost of keeping Metropolis functioning; and 11811, a worker Freder befriends who later betrays him.)

Running time (with scissors):
Metropolis clocked in at 157 minutes in its original German premiere.  Silent film running speeds vary, but we know Lang’s preferred projection speed and so the 157 minute length is our benchmark.

When the film went into wide release in Germany, the UFA studio trimmed it down to 116 minutes.

Lang reportedly was not happy with this cut but tolerated it.

However, when the film was released in the US, Parufamet (a distribution company fronting for Paramount and MGM when distributing UFA movies in America) decided the film remained too long and hired Channing Pollock, a Broadway playwright with extensive credits, to edit the film and re-write the intertitles to make a more streamlined story.

Pollock decided since it was a sci-fi story, he would jettison everything except the sci-fi elements, eliminating the four interlocking sub-plots that made Metropolis the thoughtful and complex epic Lang intended and focusing instead solely on Robot Maria, turning the film into a movie about an evil robot.

FU, Channing Pollock.

This version ran about 105-107 minutes (time inexact due to varying projection speeds of that era).

For the UK release, British distributors originally ran a 127 minute version in major markets, later trimmed down to 118 minutes for the provinces, following Pollock’s edit but keeping a bit more of the original footage.

In eliminating everything non-science fictional about Metropolis, Pollock also dropped Jon Fredersen’s desire to merely neutralize Maria as well as Rotwang’s revenge motive.

Instead, he had the two plotting to replace the workers with robots, and used Robot Maria to lure them to their destruction.

Problem:
You don’t want to massacre all the workers until you’ve built enough robots to replace them!

You see why the most commonly available versions of Metropolis were virtually incomprehensible.

Metropolis got trimmed down again in the 1930s for the art house circuit, now limping in at 91 minutes.

The UK also ended trimming their version down to around 80 minutes, though oddly enough their version made a bit more sense than the US cut.

This remained the state of things for most of the 20th century. 

The first time I saw Metropolis was at Noreascon in Boston in 1971, but my pump had been primed by numerous articles extolling its virtues in various monster mags, sci-fi digests, and fanzines, including a few by people old enough to remember seeing it in its original US run before it got truncated even more severely.

I certainly felt impressed by the sheer visual spectacle, but remember feeling the story felt kind of trite and cliché (not surprising, since so many imitated it later, and I’d seen those lesser works first).

I later saw it on PBS, and again at the old Sherman Theater in the San Fernando Valley, a revival house that used to have a yearly sci-fi film festival.

That version was the UK cut, and it caught my attention that the intertitles read differently, many of the characters now had different names, and several scenes I remembered were missing.

Still, the editors working on the UK version did a better job than the US version, but it still remained an incomprehensible movie.

At some point (perhaps as far back as my Army days), I read the Ace paperback reprint of the novel version of Metropolis by Lang’s wife and screenwriting collaborator, Thea von Harbou.

I remember it being very Germanic, and it did little to increase my comprehension of the film’s plot.

In 1984 composer Giorgio Moroder released his restored and colorized version of Metropolis, using a copy of the original script as a template, footage found in East Germany, and re-created scenes using stills with animation.

His version clocked in at a mere 83 minutes, but that’s attributable to his eliminating intertitles in favor over overdubbing and music.

What can I say?  I like Moroder’s Metropolis.  He restored enough of the Rotwang sub-plot for the film to finally make sense, and while purists dislike the overdubbing / music / colorization, it gave the film a vibrant, robust look and feel that lifted it far above the crappy US & UK public domain versions popping up in video collections everywhere.

If you’ve seen Metropolis only on a bargain basement DVD collection, you’ve only seen the grossly edited versions.

You owe it to yourself to track down the really primo restoration.

Whatever one’s opinion of the Moroder restoration, it sparked international interest in restoring Metropolis to as close to the original release as possible.

The written score for the original silent film was located, and this confirmed the 153 minute running time.  The first major restoration effort began in 1987 and culminated in 2001 with what’s now called Metropolis:  The Restored Authorized Edition which finally got the film back to its 157 minute length.

For still missing scenes and footage, the 2001 restoration used still photos and title cards.

This meant some pretty lengthy sequences where viewers were staring at the same title card for several minutes, but it finally gave modern audiences a glimpse of what Lang intended.

Over the next decade more missing footage was discovered in Argentina and although it was a badly degraded and poorly cropped 16mm print, it restored most of the missing scenes.

The Complete Metropolis (2010) is probably about as complete a version as we’re likely to see.  It’s missing a few short bits at the beginnings and ends of some scenes, a sermon delivered by a monk that is later referenced by The Thin Man in this restored version, and half of Freder’s climactic fight with Rotwang, but it got most of the important missing material, including the harrowing escape of the children led by Freder and the real Maria from the flooding workers’ quarters.

Seriously, Pollock?  You left this out, some of the best and most exciting material in the movie?

Metropolis now is the great and grandiose epic Friz Lang intended, far superior to any of his other films (and he made some damn fine films in both Germany and the US).

It’s 2 ½ hours you won’t mind spending in the dark.

. . .

We might as well mention all the other “Metropolis” movies out there, inspired (more or less) by Lang’s epic work.

The Giant Of Metropolis (1961) is an Italian pepblum which, for a change of pace, takes place thousands of years in the future instead of thousands of years in the past.  The production and costume design for a low budget 1960s sci-fi film are pretty amazing but what’s even more amazing is that it took six guys to write this! Available on YouTube.

Siegfried Saves Metropolis (1965) is not one but at least eight short amateur films made for a film contest sponsored by Famous Monsters Of Filmland magazine.  Forry Ackerman, FM’s editor, wrote two short film scripts for “monster kids” to make, one for stop motion fans, the other (Twin Of Frankenstein) for those interested in make-up.  Winners include later pros such as Richard Corben (who entered under his then wife’s name since he was selling art to Warren Publishing on the side) and Paul Davids, who became a writer on the original Transformers.  Among Davids’ many credits is the documentary The Sci Fi Boys, which contains a brief clip of the only known surviving footage from any of the contest films.   None of the other entries are known to have survived, and several contestants complained they never received either their prizes or their films back.

Express Yourself (1989) is a Madonna video heavily derived from Metropolis imagery.  Good, but not among her very best.  I’m disappointed she didn’t turn into a robot.  While we’re at it, I might as well include Queen’s Radio Gaga from 1984 and this fan edit video of Zager & Evans’ In the Year 2525 by Sanjin from 2014.

Metropolis (2001) is an anime based on a 1945 Osuma Tezuka manga.  Tezuka built his story around a single image, a still of robot Maria’s creation in the original Metropolis.  The film incorporates more elements of Lang’s film, expanding on Tezuka’s original.  It’s a good anime, but nowhere near the power of the original. 

© Buzz Dixon