Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
re: Metropolis
Well, it was a silent movie, so no, it had no original sound.
Well, it was Giorgio Moroder's idea, I think, he was sort of the brains behind that particular version. The thing you have to remember about Metropolis is, for many decades, the only versions of the film that were known to exist were heavily edited. Any complete print that might have existed was most likely lost during WWII, either due to one of the Allied military campaigns, or Nazi censorship.
Though it may seem like a joke now (and I guess for some, it was very much an act of sacrilege, colourizing the picture and adding an 80's rock/pop soundtrack), it was important for a couple reasons:
1. It was the first serious attempt to restore the movie to anything even remotely resembling a complete print. Up until then, only the edited prints from the original US distributor were known to exist.
2. It put Metropolis in the public eye (also in part thanks to Queen's Radio Ga-Ga video, which used footage from the film, which they were allowed to use via Freddie Mercury's participation in the Moroder soundtrack), which had people talking about the film (if in a lower key fashion than, say, Star Wars or Star Trek).
Well, Moroder had the legal right to do whatever he wanted to do with the picture, so it was about official as it was going to get, circa 1984, short of having a necromancer bring Herr Lang back from the dead so that he could give his consent.
In the decades since, theoretically better and more complete restorations have been done, with a nearly complete print of the picture being found in Argentina, of all places, about 12 or so years ago, so the Moroder version may seem a bit of a curiosity to some, but for a lot of us, that was the first version of Fritz Lang's masterpiece we ever got to see. Before that, I only knew about Metropolis from reading about it in Starlog and other sci-fi oriented magazines. So the Moroder version was better than nothing.
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