A good 10 years before Superman hit the big city, Metropolis was an industrial dystopia on the edge of revolution. Paul Simpson enters the Time Tunnel to celebrate 80 years of Fritz Lang’s symbolist masterpiece.

Imagine a version of Star Wars in which every inch of footage featuring Chewbacca was removed. Maybe it wouldn’t feel all that different. The other key players would all be there. But there would still be something fundamentally wrong.

Today’s film fans would be up in arms at such desecration of a sci fi classic. But, 80 years ago, that’s exactly what happened to Metropolis: one of the most iconic science fiction films ever made.

Entire characters and situations were removed from Metropolis shortly after its original release, and it’s only in the last five years that we’ve been able to get a proper sense of what German auteur Fritz Lang had in mind for his masterpiece.

The World Inside

Metropolis is one of those films that’s familiar to many, but which has been seen by relatively few. Some of its imagery has entered the public consciousness – Brigitte Helm as the robot Maria, for example, or the scenes of the workers shuffling their way towards their shift, as used in the video for Queen’s Radio Ga Ga in 1984.

The film is set in a dysfunctional city, 100 years in the future. Ruled by an elite of planners and thinkers, led by Johhann Fredersen, the underclass work beneath the city, keeping the machines running so the elite can live a life of hedonistic luxury.

Fredersen’s son, Freder, becomes obsessed with a beautiful girl called Maria, and follows her into the catacombs under the city, where he is shocked by the conditions in which the workers are forced to exist. Maria has a following in this underworld, and speaks of a ‘mediator’ who will unite the workers and the elite.

Unknown to Freder, his father has ordered mad inventor Rotwang to create a duplicate of Maria, using a robot he has created. Frederson intends to spread disorder with the robot, giving him the excuse he needs to quell any rebellion among the workers...

Brave New World

By the time he came to write and direct Metropolis, Fritz Lang was already a respected director, most notably for Dr Mabuse, his study of the criminal mind. The screenplay was written by Lang and his wife Thea von Harbou (who also wrote a novel based on the story). It had been announced as his next project in the summer of 1924, but the film’s distinctive look came when Lang took a trip to New York in October that year.

Producer Erich Pommer later recalled, “We remarked that under different labels, most humans are really slaves. I said that Hollywood would never make a film about this, because they live inside of it. So we said, let us make a film about it.”

At the time, Hollywood was producing comedies, but the German cinematic industry was envied throughout the world, and received almost limitless state aid.

Lang’s movie cost around seven million Reichsmark to make (well over $200m at today’s prices), and involved a cast of thousands. Filmed at the UFA studios at Babelsburg (at that point the largest and best-equipped studios in the world), it cost nearly four times its projected budget.

It soon became an obsession for Lang, who said during filming, “A director who is not obsessed by his work into a state of ecstasy, into a state of trance, will never succeed with the film of tomorrow.”

The Shape of Things To Come

Lang handed his finished film to the Berlin censors in November 1926, 18 months after shooting began. His version was short-lived, however, and, after premiering in Berlin in January 1927, his 183-minute film would never again be seen in full.

American playwright Channing Pollock wrote a new script, cherry-picking elements from the available footage to produce a film far more acceptable (i.e. far shorter) for international audiences. He removed a henchman who was pursuing Freder throughout the film, and gave the robot its own personality (so that, instead of following Fredersen’s orders, it was pursuing its own agenda).

“I wrote a quite different story that, I believed, could be told with the available shots,” Pollard later wrote. “It wasn't a very original story, being based on the theme of Frankenstein, but it had drama and an idea. A greedy employer hoped to grow rich by hiring the inventor to create hundreds of steel workmen. These proved to be perfect, except that they could not be endowed with souls, and the result was catastrophe.”

In a contemporary press release, Pollard claimed, “As it stood when I began my job of structural editing, Metropolis had no restraint or logic. It was symbolism run such riot that people who saw it could not tell what the picture was all about. I have given it my meaning.”

Not only did Pollock’s version of the film play in America, but the German film conglomerate UFA gave permission for it to be played in Germany, prompting Lang to comment that his original film was now gone.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

Since then, most versions have used only the footage required for Pollock’s version, even if they reverted to Lang’s original story. Pop music producer Giorgio Moroder produced a controversial edition in 1984, tinting the footage, creating subtitles for the dialogue and adding a contemporary soundtrack.

It wasn’t until 2002 that a full reconstruction of the film was undertaken. All known footage was brought together and digitally restored, with caption cards added to cover the footage that was no longer available. The original score, prepared for Lang’s 1927 premiere, was also re-recorded.

Both the 2002 reconstruction and the 1984 Moroder version of Metropolis are worth seeking out. For a film that’s not been easily available in its intended form, it’s been very influential – informing cities as diverse as Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, Coruscant in the Star Wars films and the nightmare world of Dark City.

And one has to wonder what hidden message Superman creators Joe Schuster and Jerry Siegel had in mind when they used the name Metropolis for their hero’s adopted home…