Metropolis

City Paper Grade: A-

by Sam Adams

Kino's The Complete Metropolis contains nearly a hundred instances of restored footage, ranging from brief reaction shots to entire sequences. Subplots resurface, most notably involving the adventures of the worker who is freed from his mechanized drudgery by Freder Fredersen (Gustav Fröhlich), the son of the city's ruler. Worker 11811 (Erwin Biswanger), or Georgy, as he is now known, hotfoots it to the pleasure district of Yoshiwara, where he is apprehended by the elder Fredersen's skeletal henchman.

Although the Yoshiwara sequence was likely eliminated for reasons of censorship (the primary villain being Lang's American distributor, Paramount), the loss of the Georgy subplot also transforms the movie from a collective drama to a heroic narrative. In the restored version, Lang parallels the plights of Joh, Georgy and Josaphat (Theodor Loos), the ruler's right-hand man, who is fired after a fatal accident with the city's monstrous Heart-Machine. (In a city defined entirely in terms of work, losing one's job is equivalent to a death sentence.) Effectively representing the workers, bourgeois functionaries and the ruling class, the restored Metropolis' trifold protagonists profoundly deepen its conceptual riches. Even the demonic inventor Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is humanized somewhat, his creation of the monstrous Man-Machine (Brigitte Helm) motivated by his longing for his late wife.

They also restore to narrative coherence a movie that for decades has been possible to appreciate only as a jumbled treasure trove of indelible imagery. For the first time, Metropolis actually makes sense. Lang's creation is still far more successful at imagining its dystopian future than its individual characters (Fröhlich's histrionic gesticulating remains, as ever, a weak point), but now it's more of a fair fight.