Sunrise ***** (1927, George O’Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston) – Classic Movie Review 2472

Director F W Murnau’s 1927 silent movie morality fable, subtitled A Song of Two Humans, was for a very long number of years a neglected masterpiece. But it was splendidly restored in 1997 as a Channel 4 silent, finally restoring and permanently ensuring its reputation and fame. Although the original negative was destroyed in the 1937 Fox studio vault fire, a new negative was created from a surviving print.

In 1929, it won the Oscar for Best Unique and Artistic Production (an Oscar only awarded at the first Academy Awards and then as prestigious as Outstanding Picture), and Janet Gaynor won the first ever Best Actress Oscar (shared for her work in Seventh Heaven and Street Angel).

Carl Mayer’s screenplay story from Hermann Suderman’s short story A Trip to Tilsit [Die Reise nach Tilsit], follows the life of The Man, the young farmer Anses (George O’Brien), who marries a nice girl, The Wife, Indre (Janet Gaynor), and they live in a farmhouse with their child.

But The Man is seduced by a holidaying evil temptress Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston). She tries to convince him to drown his wife and he then plots to kill his wife and pursues the vamp to the city.

This silent classic is brilliantly performed, beautifully directed and gorgeously shot (cameramen Karl Struss and Charles Rosher won the film’s third Oscar for Best Cinematography) with warm Vermeer-style farmhouse interiors. It is now deservedly famed for some great brio moments like the single take of the farmer’s tramp through the moonlight marsh to meet the vamp.

Sunrise features enormous, stylised sets that create an exaggerated, fairy-tale world. Inter-titles are used very sparingly, with long sequences of action and the bulk of the story told visually in Murnau’s signature style. The ground-breaking cinematography includes impressive tracking shots. The amazing city street set cost more than $200,000 to build. Much of the exterior shooting was done at Lake Arrowhead, California.

Also in the cast are Bodil Rosing, J Farrell MacDonald, Jane Winton, Arthur Housman, Eddie Boland and Ralph Sipperly.

Because Murnau chose the new Fox Movietone sound-on-film system, it is one of the first films with a soundtrack of music and sound effects. It incorporates Charles Gounod’s Funeral March of a Marionette, Hitchcock’s TV show theme tune.

Murnau directed two German Gothic masterpieces, The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1919) and Nosferatu (1923), before going to Hollywood and re-establishing himself there. He was one of the leading figures in the German Expressionist style using distorted art design for symbolic effect. Murnau was invited by studio boss William Fox to make an Expressionist film in Hollywood.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2472

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