Click to previous page   Where It All Started Director Fritz Lang on drums, lead actress Brigitte Helm on sax, and writer Thea von Harbou (Mrs. Fritz) on piano. Odd combo. Motion Picture News vol. 33 no. 16, 17 April 1926, p. 1,668. Trade advertisement created by Anthony Julius “Tony” Gablik (father of Suzi). Why does it look unlike anything in the movie? Because it was created half a year before the movie began filming! We were all told that Metropolis was a German production, but we can see that the Paramount Pictures logo dwarfs the Ufa credit. Hollywood was the boss on this this picture, and Ufa acted as little other than a front. That was the picture’s doom, as we shall examine below, so far as the meagre evidence will allow us to do so. The world première was at two cinemas in Berlin, the Ufa-Palast am Zoo and the Ufa-Pavillon am Nollendorfplatz. UFA-Pavillon am Nollendorfplatz during the Metropolis première engagement UFA-Palast am Zoo in September 1925 Metropolis was not one movie. Like most productions of its day, it was three movies. Each scene was performed thrice to create three original negatives. One would be for Germany and for the other countries that were on the same distribution circuit (presumably Austria, Switzerland, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Estonia, and maybe some others). A second negative would be for the US and Canada, as apparently Paramount Pictures had financed the production in return for a distribution contract. This second negative stayed with Paramount for the duration of the distribution license. Finally, the third negative would be used to make prints for export to the rest of the planet. This export negative was initially sent to Paramount, which modified it and then forwarded it to Wardour Films in London — or so I presumed. It’s beginning to look as though Paramount returned it to Ufa, which ran off Agfa prints to export to Wardour in England and to various distributors throughout the globe. https://youtu.be/G1Wkjq0aY7o My preference would be to watch the whole movie this way, three images side by side. When YouTube disappears this video, right-click and download it here. Michael Organ describes the above poster thus: “three sheet poster, 36½ × 83 inches (96 × 211 cm), colour lithograph, Designer — Heinz Schulz-Neudamm, Berlin, 1927. Issued in connection with the film’s initial Berlin release on 10 January 1927.” It’s worth a couple of pennies on the collectors’ market. Advertisement art by Kurt Degen. Looks like a handbill. Original advertisement art by Werner Graul. German pressbook cover. Either the cover art is unsigned or the artist’s name was purged. Since it is so similar to Werner Graul’s piece, I assume that this is his or a modification. When the movie first came out, it was nearly two and a half hours long. Just afterwards, it was much shorter. Aitam Bar-Sagi, in “‘Metropolis’ around the World,” The Film Music Museum, 9 January 2018, has a nice summary of the variants of this movie. I calculated the running times based on the modern projection speed of 24fps (fps=frames per second), as well as on the original projection speed of 26fps. We should be aware that the abridged German edition was projected at 28fps. Anything longer than 153 minutes @ 24fps is due to an anomaly, such as repeated footage in a capsule summary to open the second half of the presentation. Other variations are surely attributable, in small part, to the differences in the three original negatives. DATE NEG PLACE REELS METERS FEET @ 24FPS @ 26FPS 10 Jan 1927 German Berlin, roadshow 16   4,189   13,743   153 min 141 min 06 Feb 1927 German Vienna 16   4,224   13,858   154 min 142 min 17 Feb 1927 German? Budapest 16   4,189   13,743   153 min 141 min 18 Feb 1927 German? Netherlands 17   4,488   14,724   164 min 151 min 28 Feb 1927 German? Oslo 9   2,447   8,028   89 min 82 min 05 Mar 1927 German? Copenhagen 9   2,480   8,136   90 min 83 min 05 Mar 1927 US New York City 9   2,450   8,039   89 min 82 min 07 Mar 1927 US only for NYC censor board 12   3,170   10,400   116 min 107 min 08 Mar 1927 US US (censored) 9   2,446? 8,025? 89 min 82 min 12 Mar 1927 German? Tallinn 16   4,189   13,743   153 min 141 min 21 Mar 1927 Export London 12   3,048   10,695   119 min 109 min 04 Apr 1927 German? Stockholm 9   2,560   8,399   93 min 86 min 05 Aug 1927 German Germany, general release 12   3,241   10,633   118 min 109 min 13 Aug 1927 US US (revised) 8   2,337   7,667   85 min 78 min 30 Sep 1927 German? Prague 16   4,189   13,743   153 min 141 min Nov?? 1927 Export UK (shortened) 10   2,602? 8,537? 95 min 87 min 20 Feb 1928 Export Rome 10? 2,881   9,452   105 min 97 min 03 Apr 1929 Export Japan 8? 2,267   7,438   83 min 76 min Unanswered question: Who abridged the Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish releases, and why? The lengths are suspiciously similar to the 8,039' length of the NYC print of March. Had Paramount barked out orders this early? Was it Ufa Berlin that obeyed, or was it the local distributors who chopped away at the prints? Continue to Chapter 2, December 1926: Paramount’s Regrettable Ideas