— Author: Charley Brady —
From the first shots of The Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston), we know. With her dark hair and eyes, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth as she bustles around in her lingerie, we just know that she is a bad lass. She may be easy on the eye, but she’s not the kind of woman that you would take home to Mama Bear.
Just as we know that The Wife (Janet Gaynor) is the personification of Virtue. Sure, she doesn’t strike us as the sharpest pencil in the box but she has these great big Bambi eyes and is obviously a hard-working and loyal farmer’s wife, so we don’t exactly need a map drawn for us.
Then there’s The Man (George O’Brien), the husband who is caught between a slightly faded love for his good lady and the allure of the forbidden city fruit. And as my dear old mum would have said, ‘He’s so dim that he can’t see over a fence’. Because it’s pretty obvious that the City Woman is at least as much interested in the money he’s going to get for selling his farm as she is in him. A fair bit, she thinks; especially if little Wifey is out of the way.
And that’s as much as you need to know concerning the plot of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). Because if you are seeing this masterpiece for the first time, then I envy you; if it is a return visit then you’ll take in even more than you did previously. It’s that kind of film.
And please don’t be put off by the grim subject matter, for this is very much a film of two halves. In fact, the long interlude in The City is an exuberant, joyous, and fascinating sequence in which Murnau gets to play with the camera in ways that still have the power to astonish.
That towering German expressionist needs no introduction here; he is one of the giants of that era. But this was his first film after moving to Hollywood and in all fairness, it must be noted how closely he worked with his cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss and just what a wealth of ideas they contributed to Sunrise. There is so much to talk about, but I’ll limit myself to two startling images: as The Man and his lover lie together in a marshy area near the farm, she conjures for him tempting images of The City, of which we the audiences are also cognizant.
Mind you, she then goes into a demented dance the likes of which have to be seen to be believed. And I don’t care how much this fella was thinking with his nether regions, alarm bells should have been shrieking through his head as he ran screaming for the hills.
And then there is the shot where The Man is in torment over the choice he must make – and as he broods, there is juxtaposed behind and over him, the image of the Woman from the City, appearing (possibly by accident) like a predatory vampire as she leans close to his neck.
The late great Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert had this to say:
“The cameras employed in the first silent films were lightweight enough to be picked up and carried, but moving them was problematic because they were attached to the cameraman, who was cranking them by hand. Camera movement was rare; the camera would pan from a fixed position. Then came tracking shots - the camera mounted on rails so that it could be moved along parallel to the action. But a camera tan apparently weightless cameral fly, that could move through physical barriers - that kind of dreamlike freedom had to wait until almost the last days of silent films. And then, when the talkies came and noisy sound cameras had to be sealed in soundproof booths, it was lost again for several years.”
And he added:
“The film was released at the very moment when silent films were giving way to sound; The Jazz Singer was already making its way into theatres. Murnau's film had a soundtrack, avoiding dialogue but using music and sound effects in sync with the action. By the next year, audiences would want to hear the actors speaking, and that led to an era of static compositions and talking heads, unforgettably lampooned in Singin’ in the Rain.”
“Released in what Peter Bogdanovich calls the greatest year in Hollywood history when silent films reached perfection and then disappeared, Sunrise was not a box-office success, but the industry knew it was looking at a masterpiece.”
Indeed, it did. When the very first Academy Awards were announced in 1929, Sunrise was the winner, with Janet Gaynor – one actress who made the transition successfully to talkies - also receiving an award.
Oh. And that first Oscar Ceremony was all 15 minutes long. Today’s self-congratulatory, overly political, virtue-signaling, back-slapping bore-a-thon could take a lesson from that. Who knows? They might then actually pick a decent winner – for a change.
I’d like to talk about Hugo Reisenfeld’s musical contribution; and I’d dearly love to talk about my favourite scene – the tram ride in which everything is heartbreakingly internalized whilst Life goes on outside as usual. But I’ve probably already crossed that line that I’m giving out at the Oscars about putting people to sleep.
So, I’ll just say it again: if this is your first viewing of Sunrise… I envy you.
Watch Agustina`s performance here: