Into the Way-Back Machine, folks. It's time for a really cool story.
German-Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang's groundbreaking science-fiction epic Metropolis, about a massive city of the future where the elite classes live on the backs of a vast population of slave laborers, was such a gigantic undertaking at the time that it cost nearly half of its studio's annual operating budget, and the fact that it wasn't a success nearly bankrupted the company. When it was panned by critics and audiences of Berlin, nearly half an hour was cut from the film in an attempt to broaden its appeal, and that edited footage was thought to be lost forever.
It turns out forever is only 80 years. The curator of the Cinema Museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has discovered almost all of that footage, minus only one scene involving a doomsaying monk, in the form of a more lightly-edited version that screened there back in 1928. So now, German film historians claim they have the ability to actually put together a complete version of the masterpiece created by Lang and his novelist wife Thea von Harbou (with significant influence from H.G. Wells) that still endures as a visionary work of art to this day.
