metropolis

In the ground-breaking 1927 silent film by Fritz Lang, a female android leads the working class, forced to live underground, into a rebellion against the rarified upper class who live on the surface. The idea that the modern city rests on the backs of the working man is made evident In this vintage German poster.

Over 2,000 people braved snowy weather to attend the Berlin Film Festival's special screening of a new cut of the classic silent film, Metropolis. And with that enthusiastic response to the sold out event, Metropolis is getting another theatrical release.

Two years ago, three reels of missing scenes were found in a Buenos Aires cinema museum. The footage was verified by German film historians as authentic shortly afterward, and the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation spent the last two years restoring the film to it's original 150 minutes. The last time the uncut version was seen was May 1927.

Fritz Lang's 1927 avant garde dystopian class struggle was groundbreaking film technically as well as visually. Unfortunately, it was not received well by audiences when it first released, resulting in cuts after dismal box office receipts.

While it was assumed that the 25 minutes of footage were left on the cutting room floor, at least one uncut version made it's way to South America because an Argentinian distributor preferred the original cut. Instead of meeting a contractual obligation to destroy the print after it's theatrical run, he handed it off to a critic. The tale of the missing reels seems worthy enough of a film itself.

Despite being an initial box office failure, it is an undeniable classic, with new fans discovering Metropolis every generation. (In 1984 a colorized version with a rock soundtrack featuring the likes of Freddy Mercury and Pat Benatar was the last time it saw theatrical re-release.) Dieter Kosslick, festival director of the Berlin Film Festival, said that Metropolis has screened seven times at the festival since 1951. Only now the too-familiar disclaimer of missing scenes can be removed.

According to Ain't it Cool News, it's getting a theatrical release as well as a DVD/Blu-Ray release for the holidays.

Last month, we heard a rumor about The CW's Smallville ending its run with a TV movie called Metropolis. The most exciting part of this idea was the possibility of seeing Tom Welling's Clark Kent finally put on the cape and tights and take flight as Superman. Will it happen? The show's producers are reportedly prepping for a big announcement at Sunday's Smallville Comic-Con panel, but the new rumor has some Con attendees already receiving a sneak peek at what's to come. Here's John Scott Lewinski reporting from TV Squad:

A persistent rumor around the Comic-Con International floor says a major television network is abducting random innocent people and forcing them to look at a man's intimate garments.

It seems CW's Smallville series will finally go full-on Superman this year and knock off all of this Clark Kent adolescent, romantic angst nonsense. And Superman needs a super suit to match his new gig. CW reps are reportedly pulling random faces out of the crowd to go behind the scenes and get a glimpse of the mythical outfit.

By Eric Snider

It was around this time last year that the film world got an astonishing bit of news: A huge chunk of footage that was missing from Fritz Lang's 1927 classic Metropolis -- and presumed lost forever -- was FOUND in a museum's archives in Argentina. The film, a futuristic sci-fi thriller that has influenced everything from Blade Runner to Tim Burton's Batman, was 153 minutes long when it premiered in Berlin, where it was a huge flop with critics and audiences. It was subsequently chopped down to about 90 minutes, and once the American copyright expired, in 1953, various people started releasing "restored" versions, none of them complete. And that missing footage just sort of disappeared.

The copyright was re-established by the F. W. Murnau Foundation in 1998, and in 2002 a 127-minute version was released on DVD, all the footage cleaned up as much as possible and the original musical score re-recorded. Intertitles were used to explain the content of the 26 minutes' worth of scenes that were still missing.

The footage discovered last year is said to represent about 85 percent of those missing scenes, and the plan was to release a newly restored version on DVD and Blu-ray sometime this year that would incorporate all this newly found material. It would be very nearly the same film that Lang released in 1927, and certainly much, much closer to it than anyone thought we'd ever see.

But that DVD/Blu-ray edition will have to wait a little longer. The latest word is that the footage has just now been put in the hands of the F.W. Murnau Foundation in Germany, and that now the restoration process on the badly damaged footage can begin.

And Smallville refuses to give up the spotlight.

In less than a month, we've heard talk about a possible spinoff for the CW series, read heated speculation over a simple casting notice, and reported on two major casting announcements. Now we're reading rumors about a possible Smallville TV movie called Metropolis that could serve as a coda to the show's ninth, and probably final, season.

The rumor -- and I repeat: rumor -- comes from the boys at AICN who say a source got a glimpse of some Smallville promotional signage for the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con. Reportedly, the source, who goes by the handle "Yoda's Bitch," eyed some signage somewhere, presumably on the planet Earth, featuring the words "Metropolis: Christmas 2010" in Smallville-style font. The sign is also supposedly advertising Smallville's upcoming Comic-Con panel. AICN says they have info that this possible Metropolis project could be a TV movie set to head into production after May 2010, when the series is expected to wrap. The CW or Warner Bros. has yet to confirm any of this.