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In the year of Wood's American Gothic, a lambent pendant to Sunrise. Rural Minnesota and urban Chicago are the structural poles and F.W. Murnau has a little gag to bridge them, a dissolve from "our daily bread" at the solemn dinner table to slices popping out of a machine at the clammy downtown lunchroom. Tasked with selling the family's crop, the visiting boy (Charles Farrell) is so innocent as to ward off a vamp simply by being more engrossed in his homemade sandwich; the girl (Mary Duncan) works the counters and shoos lechers like flies, a hard-boiled shrug ("Guess one place is as good as another") to mask a yearning for the pastoral. (Rattling elevated train, dusty flowerpot and wind-up birdcage comprise her abode, a cogent Ashcan School composition.) Courtship into marriage, a celebration (the jubilant couple runs across the wheat field with the camera by their side, one of the loveliest of all tracking shots) quickly halted. Reeling from the heavy hand of her severe new father-in-law (David Torrence), the bride bursts into tears: "And this is our honeymoon!" The mechanical fortune-teller at the station and the grain stalk between Bible pages, curious poetry everywhere Murnau looks in his American "hornet's nest." Rowdy farmhands on the combine harvester, one (Richard Alexander) plays interloper to the newlyweds just as an elemental disaster approaches. Hope and disenchantment and forgiveness before incoming hailstorms, the truncated yet wholly ravishing metaphor of marriage painted with oil-lamp chiaroscuro. Runaway cart and shotgun figure in the revelation at the crossroads, a matter of a light to see by. "Don't people ever fall in love out here?" Vidor and Malick carry the torch, the auteur is off to Polynesia (Tabu). Cinematography by Ernest Haller. With Edith Yorke, Guinn Williams, Anne Shirley, Tom McGuire, Marjorie Beebe, Roscoe Ates, and Jack Pennick. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |