Metropolis
Directed by Fritz Lang
****

My first viewing of Fritz Lang’s landmark 1927 film Metropolis happened sometime in the early ‘90s via an unassuming VHS tape (remember those?) that lived in my family’s home video collection.  Presentation-wise, I couldn’t have asked for a worse way to see the film for the first time.  The transfer was sub-par resulting in images that were scratched and faded, the intertitles were barely legible and because it was one of those EP video cassettes (that’s “extended play” to anyone born after 1995) I was constantly fiddling with the VCR settings to get the movie to play at the right speed.

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