(Fw Murnau, 1929, U, Eureka)
The great German director Fw Murnau made three silent movies for Fox in Hollywood before co-directing his only sound film, Tabu, with the documentarist Robert Flaherty, and dying in 1931 aged 42. His first Hollywood silent, Sunrise, is universally acclaimed; the second one, Four Devils, no longer exists; and the third, City Girl, was for years known only through a re-edited, semi-sound version which Murnau disowned. The silent City Girl is a lyrical masterwork of pastoral realism, in which Lem, a simple farm boy from Minnesota (Charles Farrell), in Chicago to sell the family's wheat crop, meets and marries Kate (Mary Duncan), a waitress yearning for an idyllic life in the countryside. When they return to Minnesota, however, they're met with hostility by coarse, lascivious harvesters and Lem's overbearing father. It is a rural melodrama of great beauty and honesty, the inspiration for Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven...
The great German director Fw Murnau made three silent movies for Fox in Hollywood before co-directing his only sound film, Tabu, with the documentarist Robert Flaherty, and dying in 1931 aged 42. His first Hollywood silent, Sunrise, is universally acclaimed; the second one, Four Devils, no longer exists; and the third, City Girl, was for years known only through a re-edited, semi-sound version which Murnau disowned. The silent City Girl is a lyrical masterwork of pastoral realism, in which Lem, a simple farm boy from Minnesota (Charles Farrell), in Chicago to sell the family's wheat crop, meets and marries Kate (Mary Duncan), a waitress yearning for an idyllic life in the countryside. When they return to Minnesota, however, they're met with hostility by coarse, lascivious harvesters and Lem's overbearing father. It is a rural melodrama of great beauty and honesty, the inspiration for Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven...
- 5/21/2011
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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