The Metropolis mystery is finally complete!

One of the greatest film mysteries of all time has to be the whereabouts of the missing footage to one of the great silent classics, Fritz Lang's 1927 German masterpiece "Metropolis". For years the film had been released in many different cut versions from its original 153-minute master print. In the 1980's I remember record producer Giorgio Moroder releasing a controversial 87-minute edited version of the film complete with a then-modern rock score accompanying the film. During that time I remember seeing at a friend's house a 120-minute re-edit using classic rock and roll songs as the underscore, among them Percy Faith's "When a Man Loves a Woman" underscoring the first appearance of the female robot Hel. But the whereabouts of the remaining footage always remained a mystery.

In 2002 German film restoration producer Martin Koerber gave the world a completely restored version of "Metropolis" compiled from all of the then-available resources from prints accessible at that time. The film looked incredibly better than ever, but at 124 minutes in length (based on an upscaling of 30 frames per second, followed by a downscale transfer to 24 fps in NTSC format), there still remained some 25 minutes of footage missing. When the DVD was released by Kino Video, it was hailed as a marvelous, though flawed, attempt to reconstruct a classic, and the liner notes sadly stated that (if I remember correctly), "Until a more complete print surfaces, we must believe the missing footage to be irretrievably lost forever."

Welcome to forever.

Over on the Digital Bits website, Bill Hunt (one of the most rabid "Star Trek" fans you'll ever meet), proudly announced that the missing footage to "Metropolis" had finally been located!!!!! I can almost hear Marlon Brando's voice by now: "This is no fantasy, no careless product of wild imagination..."

According to a report on TDB, a 16-millimeter print of "Metropolis" containing the lost scenes was located in Buenos Aires, Argentina recently. The film was studied and analyzed, and believe it or not, the missing scenes were in fact there, complete and unedited!!! According to the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation, who, along with Koerber, oversaw and produced the previous restoration for the 2002 DVD release, the key missing scenes are scratchy but complete. This now opens the door for the film's complete, and hopefully final, restoration, which has film fans and serious film students hoping that it will be on the Blu-Ray DVD release next year. In all fairness, the extra footage belongs only in one place: IN THE FILM ITSELF, completely restored and cleaned up, and not in some silly supplemental section.

Now THIS is a wonderful surprise indeed! While I haven't converted to Blu-Ray, I do have the capacity to watch Blu-Ray discs, thanks to my PlayStation 3 unit. But the 2009 release of "Metropolis" may finally push me over the edge and become a convert. We shall wait and see.

(Now if someone would just do the same for that other famous lost missing footage, from the original preview print of "Superman IV", then the world will be a perfect place once again.)

UPDATE: Yesterday on CNN they showed during one of the news programs several seconds of footage from the missing footage from "Metropolis", and I have to admit, I am positively stunned beyond belief! This is like the Holy Grail of film! While the footage is not in good condition due to its age, the print is nonetheless complete and the scenes are watchable. Granted, it'll take some time for Martin Koerber and his team to clean up all of that lost footage and restore them to as good a condition as possible so it can be finally placed with the remaining footage. All I can say is that I believe it will be done, and done right. Home theater buffs and serious film students definitely deserve it.