Metropolis and 5 Other Silent Films That Don't Feel Like Homework

Fritz Lang's sci-fi masterpiece gets a snappy new DVD release with The Complete Metropolis (new from Kino International this week), including long-lost footage that recently surfaced thanks to a 16mm print found in an Argentine vault. Sadly, the fact that it's a silent movie will cause lots of otherwise-adventurous moviewatchers to turn up their nose at it, like it was a spoonful of cod-liver oil being administered by Kate Gosselin. But even if repeated film-class screenings of Intolerance made you think that all pre-sound movies were tedious and overacted, a look at Metropolis -- or any of the following films -- should convince you otherwise.

1.) Sunrise: After more than 80 years, F.W. Murnau's haunting romance about a cheating husband, his underappreciated wife, and his slutty mistress remains one of the screen's most beautiful (in both the visual and emotional sense) love stories ever put on the screen. From the film's clever use of its intertitles -- when the mistress wonders if the wife could be "drowned," the word sinks slowly off-screen -- to its breathtaking and revolutionary use of the camera, Sunrise still gets you where it counts.

2.) The Navigator: Film scholars get all gooey over Buster Keaton's The General, but my favorite from this early comedy genius is this tale of two clueless rich kids who find themselves all alone at sea, and are forced to learn how to cook, sail, and generally fend for themselves. Keaton's agility for physical and visual humor makes words completely extraneous, and the same could be said for...

3.) The Gold Rush: ... Charlie Chaplin, who basically helped to invent the movies as we know them, even though his films still feel fresh and electric today. He's got plenty of great silent features to choose from -- City Lights, Modern Times, The Kid -- but this one's perfect for beginners, as it showcases his deft skill at balancing mammoth sight gags with intimate moments of sentimentality.

The Navigator

Gold Rush

4.) Safety Last: The other great comic of the silent era was Harold Lloyd, forever immortalized as the guy hanging off the clock (which he does in this movie). But while his breathtakingly foolhardy and hilarious stunt work is Lloyd's main claim to fame, he was the screen's original nerd, a bespectacled and underestimated little guy who managed to accomplish some extraordinary feat by the end of the movie.

5.) Greed: While MGM slashed the running time of Erich von Stroheim's masterpiece, even the butchered version still stands as one of the greatest American movies. A winning lottery tickets spells disaster for the woman who holds it and the two men who love her in this uncompromisingly hard-hitting drama. You can trace a direct line between what von Stroheim accomplished here and, say, Paul Thomas Anderson's evisceration of American avarice in There Will Be Blood.