Il nostro pane quotidiano

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...

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.

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.

Not as well known as "Sunrise" but in its own way just as fine, "City Girl" is another Murnau pastoral in which "City Girl" and waitress Mary Duncan moves to the wheatfields of Minnesota as the wife of farmer Charles Farrell, (one of the greatest and least appreciated of silent movie stars), only to find his father taking against her and life down on the farm not as ideal as she thought it would be. It's a film that is said to have influenced Terrence Malick and there are images here as eloquent as any in "Days of Heaven" and its one of the few really good parts Duncan ever had. Although she lived to be ninety-eight she only made 16 films and retired in 1932.

If the plot is novelettish Murnau's handling of it is anything but. He takes melodramatic material and situations and imbues them with a realism that the American cinema never really seemed to develop for at least a decade or two, aided by the magnificent cinematography of Ernest Palmer and the wonderful performances of the leads. It also proved to be Murnau's penultimate film; he died in a car crash the following year leaving behind a body of work as fine as any in all of cinema.

True, it isn't "Sunrise" (what is?) and it isn't even the complete silent version as Murnau envisioned it, but it's still a beautifully expressive film from one of the great masters. What's more, it's the only film I've ever seen which pinpoints a pivotal moment in American history (it seems to be set before the Crash). One thing that precipitated the Great Depression was the squeeze on farmers, who had no profit margin at all, and whose only recourse was to plant more and more, unwittingly worsening their own situation. One of the conflicts is that Charles Farrell is sent to the city to sell the wheat crop at the most advantageous price (and this is a desperate necessity), and not only fails to do so but comes home with a (perhaps unsuitable) new wife. The family patriarch has planted the farm in wheat right up to the front door, and even reprimands his little girl for picking a stalk of it to play with. They are drowning in a product everybody needs but which barely supports them, and on which they are completely dependent. The contrast between an agricultural America far from idyllic and a motorized city whose drudgery for most is at least as bad is redeemed by the awakening of human feelings and re-ordered priorities. Nothing will save these people but love and family.