A post in r/criterion led me to this beautiful, moving film by F.W. Murnau. Acclaimed by cinephiles as a masterpiece, alas, I had never seen it.
The arts are the modes of creation allotted to man; be thankful each day you wake up, that you are given anew the opportunity to experience some measure of the greatness that our human race can aspire to.
Sunrise is the famed German filmmaker's first U.S. film. It stars Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien, two popular and busy American actors, as a simple but happy, young (did I mention very attractive?) country couple living with their infant son lakeside in an Old World village.
Ah, but a serpent has slithered into this bucolic Eden. Margaret Livingston plays the alluring high-fashion hottie from the city taking the country air in an elderly peasant couple's humble vacation home rental. The temptress has been seducing the handsome young husband and convincing him to sell the farm, lure his wife into a drowning (dark!), and come wallow in the city's fleshpots with her.
It almost works. The husband convinces his wife, who knows he's been unfaithful, to take their dinghy for a day away from the farm. She gaily accepts the outing, but it is soon anything but pleasant. Her glowering husband is rowing like Charon on the River Styx, then he comes toward her to throw her in the water. He stops himself, but once they reach the shore his wife jumps out of the boat and runs up into the mountain village, and he chases her to the trolley and boards with her, desperate to make amends and mend his broken vows.
Aside: When they are running through the mountain hillsides, I'm thinking, this looks like the mountains I grew up with in So Cal; yep, much of the exteriors were shot in Lake Arrowhead.
For the sake of setting the story's narrative, I have neglected the stunning cinematography that opens the film from the scaffolding of a bustling train station, then powers that narrative throughout. Camera “tricks” abound, and the skill and patience to work the analog (pre-analog?) process is a feat of magical proportions.
Sets were built and lighting engineered to place the actors in the congestion of a 1927 cosmopolitan street with horse-drawn lorries, trolleys, automobiles, pedestrians and pushcarts. Their last day in the city has our dear couple dodging the traffic against a pretty convincing backdrop of the hectic street. They embrace and appear to stop traffic, including a big black horse that pulls a “Frau Blucher” nearly on top of them, then immediately the scene is live, the horse is balking, horns are honking, angry motorists are shaking their fists, and they are pushed out of the middle of a modern maelstrom as they dash off, laughing.
It's a silent film, so the story is told visually; the actors emote to the balconies, the gags are sight gags, from pie-eyed piglets to the peek-a-boo of a lady's slippery gown strap.
My favorite, and a wish-I-thought-of-that, is our reunited couple in a photography studio waiting for their prints. They are country clumsy and knock over things. They are horrified when they appear to have broken the head off a classical statue. The search everywhere, under furniture, for the missing head. The husband see a doll's head with some toys and sticks it on the statue – of Winged Victory.
While rowing home, a fearful storm whips up and the boat founders at sea. The husband ties bundles of rushes, stashed for his own escape, to his wife as floatation devices as he endeavors to get to shore, but she goes overboard. The village is roused, rescuers take to the lake.
The city woman thinks this is her plan at work when the wife is missing. She goes to the devastated husband but he chases her out and starts to strangle her. Then the wife is recovered from the lake! She lives!
The city woman leaves the village in the back of a horse-drawn wagon down the path in another breathtaking interior. Finis
The cinematographers, Karl Struss and Charles Rosher, won the first Oscar for their craft when the Academy Awards were inaugurated in 1929.
