Metropolis (1927)
Plays here · source: YouTube
In a towering future city split between a pampered elite above and an enslaved workforce below, the industrialist's son falls for a workers' prophet preaching reconciliation, while a mad inventor's robot double of her is unleashed to incite revolt instead.
Butchered on its original American release and pieced back together only in fragments for decades, Metropolis has had one of the strangest afterlives of any silent film — a nearly complete print, missing for eighty years, turned up in a Buenos Aires archive in 2008, restoring some twenty-five minutes historians had known only from stills and censorship records.
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