Of all the Fritz Lang films to be revived right now, Metropolis, playing from tonight until Thursday at the Uptown Theater, might be the fourth or fifth film I'd cull from the long list of masterpieces that the filmmaker amassed over his forty-plus year-long career. Fury (Lang's first American film) seems like the most logical choice—its cynical depiction of a US justice system overrun by lynch-mob politics feels eerily contemporary— while the utter weirdness of his neon-colored, semi-musical Rancho Notorious is a great antidote to formulaic Westerns.

Not to sound ungrateful; I recognize that any Lang revival is better than none at all. I also realize that no Lang film needed to be restored more than Metropolis did, as no definitive print of the film has existed since its premiere in 1927. The story of how Lang's work was butchered has often eclipsed that of the movie itself, an allegory about the clash of bourgeois and proletariat desires in a threatening city of the future. Though the length of this article doesn't permit me to share most of the better anecdotes

Another major political aside, however: One story I read explained that several major sections were cut, and subsequently lost, by the initial American distributor because they espoused Lang's Communist leanings too explicitly. This clash with Hollywood politics foreshadowed some of the problems Lang would have when directing in the US, marginalized within major studios and conned into helming little other than B movies.

In brief, the current print prepared last year by the Munich Film Archives has been said to amend many of the faults which have disgraced the out-of-print editions of Metropolis of the past seven decades, as well as restore the original musical score.

As for opinions of the movie itself, I have very little to report; my only screening of it was several years ago, on a small TV screen in my parents' bedroom, and it was interrupted several times so that I could collect the jackets of my parents' friends who were attending a dinner party. I remember being greatly impressed by the mythic, towering Expressionistic sets and use of thousands of extras to create a horrific future landscape (an element which I expect to be enhanced by the Uptown's mythic, towering screen). I also remember being confused by the romantic subplot (an element which may or may not have been clarified by the MFA restoration.). Other than these recollections, I have very few ideas of my very own with which to recommend Metropolis.

In all honesty, I don't expect the ambivalence of one college weekly critic to seriously challenge this film's place in the canon of great movies or in the hearts of moviegoers world-wide. I nonetheless suspect that my inability to recall memories of Metropolis as fond as those I have of other Fritz Lang classics has something to do with the relative absence of Lang's characteristically cynical approach to human nature.

Namely, I refer to the intense paranoia that informs the majority of Lang's work. While Metropolis does voice a genuine outrage at the exploitation of workers by a callous elite (an outrage which inspires the hero's transformation from a member of the idle rich to a workers' rights crusader), it doesn't have the mounting fear of conspiracy that adds such pungency to M and The Big Heat. In the latter film, for instance, a scene of villains plotting against the hero inspires not only fear, but pity for the hero who is entirely ignorant to this plot. Beyond that, Lang conveys a mistrust of humanity that few other directors have dared to imply. Most of the villains in Metropolis feel threatening on an idealistic Marxist level, and their evil doesn't have the immediate dread inspired by Lang's later creations (A major exception: the mad robot scientist who creates the harlot machine designed to undermine a workers' strike).

Again, I'm being ungrateful. As many other critics have been pointing out in the wake of Metropolis' American re-release, it's getting harder and harder to find a big-budgeted sci-fi film with such a daring political agenda (the xenophobic revisionism of Amelie notwithstanding). There's no doubting that this is one of the most visually unique, as well as weirdly beautiful, films ever made. An opportunity to see a restored print, with the fresh eyes of a theater full of oppressed comrades, should not be passed up.