By now, you’ve probably heard that Fritz Lang’s classic silent film Metropolis is complete again. It was believed for many years that the ninety-minute cut of the film was the only one that still existed, until a 16mm negative of the original cut was discovered on July 2nd.

In a film museum.

In the archives.

Really, doesn’t that seem like the first place you’d look for missing film? I guess no one was aggressively searching for it, which is weird, because film geeks seem to be wetting their pants over the discovery. It’s not like it was buried in a cave somewhere. If anyone had taken the time to thumb through the archives in Buenos Aires’ Museo del Cine, we could have had this ages ago.

For those unfamiliar with Metropolis, Wikipedia has a nice, succinct plot synopsis:

The film is set in the year 2026, in the extraordinary Gothic skyscrapers of a corporate city-state, the Metropolis of the title. Society has been divided into two rigid groups: one of planners or thinkers, who live high above the earth in luxury, and another of workers who live underground toiling to sustain the lives of the privileged. The city is run by Johann ‘Joh’ Fredersen (Alfred Abel).

The beautiful and evangelical figure Maria (Brigitte Helm) takes up the cause of the workers. She advises the desperate workers not to start a revolution, and instead wait for the arrival of “The Mediator”, who, she says, will unite the two halves of society. The son of Fredersen, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), becomes infatuated with Maria, and follows her down into the working underworld. In the underworld, he experiences firsthand the toiling lifestyle of the workers, and observes the casual attitude of their employers (he is disgusted after seeing an explosion at the “M-Machine”, when the employers bring in new workers to keep the machine running before taking care of the men wounded or killed in the accident). Shocked at the workers’ living conditions, he joins her cause.

Metropolis is considered one of the greatest films of all time, despite its mediocre reception during its original release in the 1920s. AICN has some images from the missing footage, which has not yet been fully restored. Kino has recently announced that all the footage, once restored, will be a part of their Blu-Ray release of Metropolis.

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