Metropolis cost a fortune, then nearly vanished
Fritz Lang’s 1927 Weimar science-fiction epic burned through more than five million Reichsmarks over seventeen months of shooting. Critics called the images dazzling and the plot naïve. Decades of cuts followed—until a damaged Argentine print helped restore nearly the original length, and UNESCO listed it as the first film on its Memory of the World register.
Shot at Babelsberg for UFA and produced by Erich Pommer, Metropolis paired Lang’s direction with a screenplay he developed with Thea von Harbou from her 1925 novel. Brigitte Helm shares the screen with Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Alfred Abel, and Gustav Fröhlich. The story unfolds in a vertical dystopia: industrial elites in towers, workers buried with the machines that keep the city alive. Freder, son of city master Joh Fredersen, and Maria try to close that class gulf. The closing intertitle declares that the heart must mediate between head and hands.
Contemporaries praised Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht’s design mix of Bauhaus, Cubism, Futurism, opera grandeur, and Gothic gloom, plus intricate effects. H. G. Wells dismissed the film as silly; others branded the politics simplistic or suspiciously communist. Runtime complaints led to heavy trimming after the German premiere. Giorgio Moroder’s 1984 rock-scored cut, a 2001 Berlin reconstruction, and later Argentine and New Zealand footage brought the film back to within about five minutes of Lang’s first cut by 2010.
Reputation flipped. Sight and Sound’s 2022 critics’ poll placed it sixty-seventh among the greatest films. On 1 January 2023 its reserved U.S. copyright expired, placing the movie in the American public domain. What began as a costly Weimar gamble became a template for screen dystopia—and a case study in how fragile film history can be when prints are cut, lost, and slowly pieced together again.
Source: Metropolis (1927 film)
