"Lost" Metropolis Footage Found

Despite F.W. Murnau having been dead for more than three quarters of a century, it looks like a director's cut of his classic 1927 film Metropolis is on the way. About 25 minutes of footage that didn't make the final cut and had disappeared has been discovered in Argentina.

Staff members of the Museo del Cine Pablo C. Ducros Hicken in the Argentine capital found the missing scenes--about 25 minutes' worth, or 25 percent of the original film--in a 16mm negative. The footage had been cut after the film's original release and was thought lost forever.

The Wiesbaden-based Murnau Foundation, which holds rights to Metropolis, plans to incorporate the scenes--which reportedly enhance narrative logic and clarify the film's story--into a new restored version of the movie, in cooperation with the Argentine film museum.