F W Murnau (1927)
A powerful, lovely and charming film. Sunrise appeared in the Sight & Sound top-ten-of-all-time for the first time in 2002 – this year it’s up from seventh to fifth. Its lofty position in the S&S poll – which is why it’s currently showing at BFI – is, I think, pushing it but Isabel Stevens makes a clear and, as far as I know, accurate case in this month’s S&S for the film’s place in cinema history:
‘Sunrise was an example – perhaps never again repeated on the same scale – of unfettered imagination and the clout of the studio system working together rather than at cross purposes. Murnau had a new Fox studio to transform into moonlight marshes and dazzling gargantuan cityscapes …’
A prologue explains that the story isn’t set in any particular place, could happen anywhere, anytime. The human emotions that fuel and shape the story of Sunrise – ambition and treachery, lust and love – give credibility to this claim (although the plot of any drama made in Hollywood on the cusp of the move from silent to sound film is liable to be contrived to an extent that arguably deprives it of true universality). The two humans of the title are a young farmer and his wife (none of the characters is named). When this pair travel to the city, it’s pretty clear from the costumes and from the social excitements and architecture that combine to enthrall them that it’s a big American city of the 1920s. Even so, the fact that Murnau had emigrated from Germany as recently as the previous year and the yoking of his European techniques and style with the technical possibilities offered by a thriving American studio combine to create a locus that’s hard to pin down, and to give Sunrise a mid-Atlantic quality of a very extraordinary kind.
I’ve known of this movie (without the ‘A Song of Two Humans’ part of the title) for forty years. Her performance in Sunrise was one of three for which Janet Gaynor won the first ever Best Actress Oscar in 1927-28. (The other two performances were in Seventh Heaven and Street Angel: Gaynor is the only actor to have won an Oscar for multiple roles – within a couple of years of the inception of the Academy Awards, actors could be nominated only for a single performance.) Janet Gaynor has a purity and simplicity of acting style which is not only appealing but also chimes with the deeply sweet-natured woman she’s playing. Gaynor is pretty rather than beautiful and this too seems right and is effective – it means the spiritual beauty that she transmits is more salient. If all this makes the character sound tiresomely idealised the actress’s truthfulness and humour ensure that doesn’t happen. George O’Brien is the husband who is tempted by a city woman holidaying in the lakeside area near where the young couple farm, and is encouraged by this vamp (excellent Margaret Livingston) to drown his wife in what will be meant to look like a boating accident. O’Brien is more uneven than Gaynor: when he does shifty or remorseful his stylised acting isn’t either surprising or expressive. But he certainly has his moments and, when the husband is relaxed or seen in repose, the effect is remarkable. O’Brien too is nice-looking rather than strikingly handsome. When he’s not obviously acting, this makes him seem more real – and gives you the sense of watching someone really going about the business of living in a time before you were born. However often you see news footage of the world that existed before you did, its impact is quite different in the context of a poetic melodrama.
After the attempted uxoricide in the lake fails, the wife escapes from her husband and desperately hails a tram, bound for the big city. The tram’s driver slows down and picks her up. The husband, in pursuit, manages to jump on too. Fear, weeping and recrimination eventually give way to a forgiving thaw and the rebuilding of trust: although all this happens in the space of a tram ride and a few screen minutes, it feels a convincingly lengthy process. The visits paid by the couple, once they’re in the big city, to its various attractions all provide them with things to enjoy and briefly to worry about, and bring them closer together. They go into a church and watch wedding vows being exchanged. They visit a professional photographer (J Farrell MacDonald), then a barber’s-shop-cum-beauty-parlour (the hairdresser is played by thin-as-a-rail Ralph Sipplerly, who’s a cross between T S Eliot and Kenneth Williams), then a fairground, then a dance. Late in the evening, the man and his wife, exhausted and happy, take the tram back to the lake and get back in their rowboat to cross the water. A violent storm blows up and the boat capsizes. The day had started with the husband trying to drown the wife; now that that’s the last thing he would want to happen, nature steps in to do the job. But the film’s title hints at a happy ending-cum-new-beginning and so it proves.
Murnau superimposes images in dreams or nightmares or in waking life (like the reflections of the couple on the plate glass window of a city store they’re looking into). This may have been innovative at the time Sunrise was made but it still seems wonderfully unusual now – because no one, thanks to the vastly increased technical sophistication of cinema, would any longer need to try to create such effects in this way. The film thereby seems to conjure up a magical past. (It reminded me very much, in this respect, of Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), for all that enchantment is so much more integral to the story in the latter.) Murnau’s orchestration of street scenes is impressive. The lighting is sophisticated and expressive. The climactic storm is spectacular and frightening both in the city and the country, and the dark waters in which the farmer’s neighbours search for his missing wife bring to mind the awesome calm of the nocturnal river journey in The Night of the Hunter some thirty years later. Sunrise also won an Oscar for cinematography for Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, as well as a once-only-awarded prize for ‘Best Unique and Artistic Production’.
The soundtrack wasn’t explained in the BFI programme note and what happened at the start of this screening makes it all the more of a mystery. In the opening sequences, as we see a train pulling into a station, the music was distorted and dissonant to an extent that made me wonder if I could stand ninety minutes of it. Then the screen went blank and we were informed there was ‘a slight technical hitch’. After the film resumed the strange music never returned. (What’s unmistakeable at one point in the score is the Gounod music, used as the theme for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.) That train at the start is bringing the polluting presence of the city woman to the countryside; when she returns to the station at the end, she’s still smartly dressed but seated in a horse-driven buggy, as if to add rustic insult to injury. The animals in Sunrise also include a dog, which helps save the wife’s life when the husband tries to do away with her, and a pig, which escapes from the fairground and into the kitchens of a city hotel. I wasn’t sure the pig was being treated humanely in the comedy routines it was put through but there’s no denying that it gives a very good performance.
18 September 2012
