this was the most classic film ever done by the German expressionist director, Fritz Lang. The studio and censors had hacked the film apart even before it was exported to the larger world. The Nazis would embrace the mechanized super-city as their own, making Lang loathe the product of his own genius. No complete authorized edition existed to this day. A rumored one found a few years ago in Rio had proved fraudulent.
"Snow," I breathed, "what do you have here? Not the complete lost footage? That would be ... priceless."
His sunglassed gaze remained fixed on the screen. "I didn't say 'Holy Grail' for nothing. Yes. Somehow the foot of the Oz rainbow pointed to the archives of a restored Wichita-area Art Deco movie palace, the Augusta, and this lost, rare, impossible footage. That's what I want here. That's what I'll take back to the Inferno Hotel, an entire new wing built around this vintage futuristic vision. I'll call it the New Metropolis Towers and Condominiums and maybe, if you treat me right, you'll have visiting privileges."
I was so freaking sold. "Imagine guests living in this vintage film city of the future. So the subterranean Nine Circles of Hell aren't playground enough for you? You're reconstructing the film world's Art Deco Tower of Babel in Vegas? You realize those biblical Babel builders blasphemed?"
"You realize," Snow said, "that 'blaspheme' is a pretty archaic concept? Especially in Vegas? Just tune in to your film fanatic mode, Delilah. I must say having you sitting here in that seriously anti-Code evening gown much enhances my viewing pleasure."
"I would wear a green clown suit for the privilege of seeing Metropolis uncut."
Snow chuckled, returning his hidden gaze from the screen. "I knew you'd appreciate this."
It's hard to overstate how rare this film was. The Holy Grail of vintage films indeed. Remembering it was twelve years from the grim but luminous black-and-white futuristic robotic fable of Metropolis to the hypercolorized, deceptively happy fable of The Wizard of Oz shows how fast the art of film developed - by leaps and bounds - and so had its audience.
I rapidly scanned my all-things-vintage memory bank.
Metropolis was a dark antitechnology tale of Maria, a sweet, loving girl who became the movie's model for the ultimate roboticized worker-drone. The "manufactured" robot queen bee built on Maria in Metropolis had inspired George Lucas to create the shiny gold C-3PO robot in the Star Wars film saga, but a more recent descendent was Seven of Nine, that sexy mechanical Borg female "construct" of nineties Star Trek television.
Now I stared at the moments of heroine Maria's on-screen re-creation, a human woman being made into a silver-metal superwoman, perhaps the most powerful image of feminine power since the Neolithic fertility goddesses. Only this dame wore body armor.
She stood on platform soles of solid metal. She packed it at the hips like a gunslinger, and don't we all, a little? I was reminded of the secondhand cop duty belt I wore for action expeditions. Her metal-gloved hands curved out from the sides of her thighs. Like a gunslinger's.
Her torso was covered by a stiff metal "stomacher" bodice Queen Elizabeth I (no monarch to mess with anywhere, anytime) would wear.
Her breastplate was topped off by steel cannonballs, size 36C. Her shoulders stood up high and rounded too, and her neck sinews combined something of the swan with something of the suspension bridge.
Her face was sculpted in perfect symmetry, but blank of eye, taut of lip, and dominated by a nose that soared into a delicate pillar to the top of her head, which wore a smooth metal bonnet. She looked like she'd never had a bad hair day, having no visible hair. She also looked like she could kick Alien ass or take down Billy the Kid. Or both at the same time. She was eternal. And she was awesome.
So was the visionary film world that had created her.
I watched, mesmerized, aware that Snow alone had the chutzpah to reconstruct this vanished apocalyptic vision of Metropolis in Las Vegas. Of course, in the film, the robotic superwoman had been destroyed. That would not happen again, from the rapt way Snow's sunglasses fixed on the screen. She would escape pre-WWII Germany and get her full second round in post - Millennium Revelation Las Vegas.
"Why are you showing this to me?" I asked, hardly noticing the time until the 153-minute film had burst like a bubble on the dark screen and vanished. But my absinthe glass was empty.
"You always want