City Girl

Silent film may be the only unique art form ever to have flourished and then become extinct. The great irony—indeed, tragedy—of its demise is that it reached its peak only in the last few years before the talkie revolution. Silent films from 1927 through 1930 dazzle with their fluid and sophisticated mastery of visual storytelling; the last thing they need is dialogue. F.W. Murnau's City Girl is a perfect example of this artistry, and what happened to it. The follow-up to Murnau's legendary masterpiece Sunrise, City Girl was made during the waning days of silents, and in a concession to the changeover to sound it was re-cut before its release and given a recorded score featuring singing farmhands. Not surprisingly, the hybrid film sank like a stone. Miraculously, an original silent print survived and was rediscovered in the vaults at 20th Century-Fox. I first saw it at the National Film Theatre in London during a Murnau retrospective. I'd never heard of it, but when I went to see Nosferatu the speaker introducing it added, "Be sure to come back next week and see City Girl—it's better than Sunrise!" This claim would be very hard to defend, but while lacking the transcendence of Sunrise, City Girl is in some ways a more complex and interesting work.

It also defends the honor of city girls from the laughably caricatured vamp who causes all the trouble in Sunrise. Like the earlier film, City Girl deals with the clash between urban and rural values, but here the countryside is no more pure or wholesome than the city. Unlike the vague, timeless setting of Sunrise, City Girl's milieu is the contemporary American Midwest. Kate (Mary Duncan) is a waitress in a busy Chicago lunchroom who lives in a dreary tenement and dreams of escaping the city. She meets Lem (Charles Farrell), a naïve and sweet-natured farm boy who has been sent to the city to sell his family's wheat crop. They fall in love, marry, and set out for the wheat-fields. But Kate's dreams are shattered by Lem's harsh, tyrannical father (David Torrence), and she finds herself waiting on rowdy, leering farmhands who are even worse than the lunchroom customers. Kate loses faith in Lem when he is unable to stand up to his father, and the marriage appears to be over almost before it began, until a series of melodramatic events force the various characters to examine their true motives and feelings.

Every aspect of this story is expressed through visual details. We are introduced to Lem on the train to Chicago, eating hand-packed sandwiches, oblivious to the flirtations of a vamp across the aisle whose interest is aroused by his bankroll (we know right off this isn't going to be Sunrise II.) We see Kate sassily quashing passes from customers ("What do you do in the evenings?" "YOU'LL never know!") and we see her in her dingy little room, watering a pathetic dusty flower on the fire-escape and listening to a wind-up mechanical bird while the El rushes past the window. The sweaty, chaotic bustle of the lunchroom is captured with tremendous verve. Once the scene moves to the country, the symbolism of wheat becomes the heart of the film (which Murnau wanted to call "Our Daily Bread.") In a ravishing scene, the newlyweds run through a glistening, swirling field of grain; when they arrive at the house, Lem's little sister greets Kate with a bouquet of wheat stalks. When the dour father enters, he rebukes her for wasting their cash crop; to him grain only means money. He also notices that Kate has put her cloche hat down on the family bible, and he is convinced that she's a floozy who sees Lem as a gravy train.

The Torrence brothers, David and Ernest, specialized in hissable nastiness, but here David's worried, American Gothic face conveys the hard life that has turned this man into a monster. It's hard to believe he could be genetically linked to a sweet-faced, curly-haired cutie like Charles Farrell, but he does make Lem's anguished weakness believable. Mary Duncan is perfect as a feisty yet vulnerable working girl, a type that would become much more common in early talkies. Duncan left the screen in 1933 when she married a polo player named "Laddie" Sanford. She lived to be 98, but her retirement was Hollywood's loss. I would like to see this intelligent, natural, black-eyed actress in something else.

City Girl is marred by an ending that feels rushed and unconvincing, but it raises interesting, at times troubling themes concerning marriage, traditional gender roles and family relationships. The most poignant aspect of this exquisitely directed film is not that it was one of the last silent movies made in Hollywood, but that its director would die in a car crash just three years later, at the age of forty-two. That was cinema's loss.

Was Murnau the greatest director ever? His life was cut short by a car accident in 1931, when he was 42 years old. What magical films he would have made had he lived.

"City Girl" is a fairly conventional story of a young man from the country who falls in love with a waitress on his first trip to the city. He marries her and brings her home to a hostile father. But Murnau takes this material and turns it into an expressionist exploration of sexuality, powering it with a theme of "it's not where we live but how we live". Within a world of hostile shadows and menacing crowds real people live and breathe in brilliant naturalistic performances. Farrell and Duncan are amazingly good. And even the smallest part is played with vivid life.

But the real star is Murnau's startling direction. Tracking shots years ahead of their time - watch the scene where the couple run through a field of wheat - extraordinary point of view shots, and remarkable shots of and in fast moving wagons. The frightening city seen in "Sunrise" is here again - with trains and crowds obscuring vision and soot on the pot plants. And then there is the beauty of the countryside and the harvesting of wheat.

Murnau made what I believe to be the best silent film ever with "Sunrise" in 1927. With "City Girl" he comes close to matching it. A must. I saw the original silent version which runs at 90 minutes. Apparently a shorter talkie version also exists.

Fairly familiar story, but told with real intimacy, restrained acting, and Murnau's always sensitive and virtuoso direction.

Murnau has been compared to Welles, since both directors have cultured, poetic sensibilities, work brilliantly with actors, and constantly experiment, testing and expanding the expressive possibilities of the film medium, but here is the difference:

Welles was an extrovert, a showman, parading his brilliance. Murnau, no less brilliant, is more subtle. His SUNRISE is to the silent era what CITIZEN KANE is to the sound era, but even in that film his innovations are "the art that conceals art".

A casual viewer will see nothing in CITY GIRL but a nice story, well-executed. But the film is full of technical bravura for cinema fans: notice the perfection of the process shots in the opening train sequence. You didn't see this done as well in many major Hollywood films made even in the 1950s. Notice the farmhouse scenes where both the interiors and the brightly sunlit exteriors, visible through windows and doors, are PERFECTLY exposed. Even today, in the 21st century, we see films in which this isn't handled as well as Murnau & Co. do it here in 1928.

I saw the 90 minute silent version, which is the one to seek out -- not the shortened, half-talkie version.

Murnau's combination of technical brilliance, bold experimentation, superb direction of actors, and deep emotional sensitivity is practically unique in film history. He did EVERYTHING well. And if you have a chance to see his much earlier DER BRENNENDE ACKER (THE BURNING EARTH) see how much of this he was already achieving even with the primitive techniques and equipment of 1922. What a tragedy such a genius had to die in a car accident at the youthful age of 42.

Excellent actors, good music, NO STUPID DIALOGUE and a story I was really interested in. The supporting actors had personality, the bad guy was realistic, for a long time the first movie I really had to see all the way to know the ending (happy end? No? Yes? No?). Perhaps a bit too much "Pathos" in the end, but I didn´t care...

Murnau's third American film after Sunrise and the lost Four Devils, and his penultimate before Tabu. City Girl, of the surviving three, is the least seen. The reason for this must be its close resemblance to Sunrise, which is a masterpiece of the first order. Yes, City Girl does remind one of Sunrise in its mood and focus. A young rube from Minnesota (Charles Farrell) travels to Chicago to sell his father's wheat crop. Business-wise, the trip doesn't go well, but his romantic world blossoms when he meets up with a lonely waitress (Mary Duncan). The two marry, and the rest of the film deals with Duncan's fight for acceptance on the farm, where she faces a fierce opponent in her father-in-law (David Torrence). The film is romantic, emotionally moving and utterly beautiful. Yes, it is a lot like Sunrise, but, heck, who wouldn't want a second Sunrise? It's hardly a carbon copy, anyway, so it's like another wonderful gift. City Girl is a masterpiece, as well. I'm not the biggest fan of Murnau's German films, but his three surviving American films are probably the best proof of the sentiment that the silent cinema was at a miraculous level right when it was snuffed by sound. Murnau tragically died in an auto accident in 1931. I find it hard to imagine his work in the talkies, but I have an inkling that the cinema would be rather different if he had survived.