Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by rico (A) on August 01, 2004 at 06:50:48

My best friend sent me this review of a new print of Murnau's 1927 masterpiece "Sunrise", being shown in Chicago. This prompted me to dig out my copy for yet another viewing and I was mesmerized as always.

By Michael Wilmington
Tribune movie critic
Published July 31, 2004

If you've never seen F.W. Murnau's 1927 silent masterpiece "Sunrise" -- and
most moviegoers haven't -- you've missed one of the most astonishingly beautiful black-and-white films ever made, a marvel of design, staging and cinematography whose visual brilliance can still take your breath away.

You've also missed a great classic film, one of the most influential of its time, which is too little seen today: a movie whose seeming contradictions make it all the more fascinating. As you watch it at the Music Box, in a beautifully restored 35mm print, the decades should melt away. Shot at 20th Century Fox in the waning years of the pre-talkie era, "Sunrise" is a silent movie that anticipates the sound era (and was released with film history's first synchronous musical track). It is a seemingly sentimental romantic drama told with an artistic sophistication and bold creativity that dazzled 1920s critics, filmmakers and audiences.

It's also a potent piece of rural and urban American lyricism, made by a European emigre filmmaker who knew America only from afar. And it's a deeply moving testament to heterosexual love and marriage from an artist who was openly homosexual: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau --the genius outsider who died four years later at 42 in a car accident.

Murnau had already assured his own immortality with the two German film classics "Nosferatu" (1922) and "The Last Laugh" (1924) that won him his invitation to Hollywood. But his greatest work was "Sunrise," a lyrical epic, or "Song of Two Humans" as the title puts it, adapted by Murnau's German screenwriter Carl Mayer from Hermann Sudermann's novella "Die Reise Nach Tilsit" ("A Trip to Tilsit").

The incandescently poetic tale that resulted is about a nameless country couple -- diminutive, childlike Janet Gaynor and sturdy but tormented George O'Brien -- driven apart by a city temptress (played by the vampy, black-clad Louise Brooks look-alike Margaret Livingston) who almost beguiles the husband into murder. This heartbreaking couple, tearfully reunited after a near-descent into terror, then take an impromptu but joyous trip into the big city, followed by a murderous storm and deadly climax during their return boat ride. Throughout, they are bathed in Vermeeresque shimmers of light or surrounded by Gustave Dore shadows of doom -- waiting, perhaps hopelessly, for the sunrise.

This deceptively simple story may strike the jaded viewer as corny. Yet, "Sunrise" is a movie, as much as "Citizen Kane," "Intolerance," "8 1/2," "Apocalypse Now Redux" or "2001: A Space Odyssey," that exemplifies the art of the cinema at its time. Murnau, Mayer, the production designers and the great American-German cinematographer team of Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, transport us to mythical landscapes reminiscent of both the America
where it was shot and the Germany where it was conceived.

Murnau, already legendary for his uncanny compositional sense, surpasses himself here -- especially in the film's two great virtuoso set-pieces of the husband plunging into a swamp's nighttime gloom for his tryst with the City Woman and later of the same man desperately following his terrified wife as she flees him in a sunlit streetcar.

For nearly a century, Murnau's masterwork has been a sacred text among cinephiles and filmmakers all over the world. A triple Oscar winner (for actress Gaynor, cinematographers Rosher and Struss and for the film's overall "artistic quality of production"), it was cited in the '50s by the legendary staff of France's film journal Cahiers du Cinema (which included the young Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Eric Rohmer) as the No. 1 picture on their joint list of the best films of all time.

And even if you disagree with the Cahiers benediction, you'll see why "Sunrise" was such an influence on the young Orson Welles and all his most adventurous colleagues -- and why audiences today are still moved and amazed as Murnau and his masterpiece carry us from darkness to light.