In Germany, Murnau had been a studio director, filming in artificial light. But he was thrilled by America. “There is a tremendous energy. The whole tradition suggests speed, fastness, rhythms of nature. Everything is new. Nature has given her a vast and beautiful landscape. A marvelous variety of vegetation, a blue sea and all this within a hundred mile radius of Hollywood.”
For his part, Fox sought class and novelty, a continental gravity to offset any fear that American pictures remained crass, industrialized and trashy, and lagging behind the other arts. Fox would have been horrified to think he was seeking something Germanic—it was so important to him to be American. Yet he wanted something “infinitely cultured.” Throughout the 1920s, Hollywood had experimented with European talents, such as Lubitsch, von Stroheim, Victor Sjöström, Garbo, and Pola Negri. And the results were often tragicomic.
Von Stroheim’s attempt to make a piece of extended European naturalism from an American classic—Greed, based on Frank Norris’s scathing novel McTeague—had led to a film so long and downbeat that Irving Thalberg, the production controller at M-G-M, had taken it away from the director and cut it down from eight hours to two. Stroheim was a true director, a visionary, and a pioneer in psychological realism, plus a nightmare to the system and a liability to himself, bound to be wronged. His attraction to sadomasochism and excessive detail alarmed his employers. It was predictable he was going to fail—but then he pioneered the place of grand failure in American films in delivering a raped masterpiece that still commands attention. But his fate made it clear that America was not really a safe haven for “Germanic genius.”
Murnau’s deal gave him everything he could think of asking for (including $125,000 for the first year). The script and the subject of the film were under his control. He was able to bring along coworkers from Germany, and he was indulged mightily in the most important element: the sets, or what we now call production design. The scale of the sets compelled Fox to buy new premises (in Westwood). No film of that era had an open budget, but Murnau does not seem to have been restricted. Some estimates are that $200,000 was spent on the elaborate sets—a huge sum for those days. Above all, Fox made a public fuss of Murnau, and offered up Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien, both robustly American, to play German peasants.
Fox must have approved the German story line (even if he couldn’t imagine what it would look like yet). His wife was his sturdy script adviser. Indeed, the script for Sunrise: The Song of Two Humans had actually been written in Germany before Murnau set out, by Carl Mayer, his regular scenarist. People said it read like a poem. It was taken from Hermann Sudermann’s story “The Trip to Tilsit” (published in 1917), the tale of a young married couple living happily in the countryside until the husband is attracted to the maid. As they undertake their trip, the wife suspects the husband means to kill her.
But Mayer and Murnau changed it for the screen: in Sunrise, the married couple have a baby, and the maid is replaced by a City Woman, a type of vamp: dark-haired, flashily dressed, seen in her underwear once, and smoking cigarettes—Pauline Kael said she had “a dirty smile.” Infatuated with her, the husband thinks to drown his wife. But the wife has no inkling of this plan until their boat trip and the menace in his attitude. The man wavers, and a heavy remorse strikes him. (Remorse is a recurring emotion in silent cinema, as if the system felt guilty over its liberation of fantasy.)
The couple’s day in the city turns into a gradual reaffirmation of their love. But as they head home at night a storm comes over the lake and the wife is swept away. The husband believes she has drowned. He is racked with guilt. The suspense is tied in to moral dismay. But the wife is saved, and the love story ends in rapture and reunion, with the vamp slinking back to the city while rural serenity resumes without our having any memory that the husband had murder in his eyes or his large hands.
It was a keynote of Sunrise that Fox allowed Murnau to enlist his own people: not just Carl Mayer, but also art director Rochus Gliese (who had served on three of Murnau’s German films) and cameraman Charles Rosher. Rosher was English and experienced in Hollywood (he had worked on several Mary Pickford vehicles), but he had met Murnau on a year-long visit to Ufa and had assisted him on his film of Faust (1926). There were also important German/Austrian assistants such as Herman Bing and Edgar Ulmer. This team supported Murnau and made American observers aware of him as a lofty authoritarian. He used to view the rushes, turn to his crew, and say, “Now we know how not to do it!” Janet Gaynor was of special value in softening her director’s heart—though Murnau himself had a romantic eye on George O’Brien, who may have been too virile to notice.
Gaynor had had to test for the part and win Murnau’s approval (he had wanted Lois Moran at first), and she was amused by the way he acted so “German”: “He had a German assistant director and I was told by people who could understand German that he was very cruel to him in his language, but he was absolutely marvelous to me. I adored him. I think he was a brilliant director. He was a hard task master, but you were willing to do what he said because you knew he appreciated it.”
One of the things she noticed in Murnau sounds very simple, but it is vital. Directors had told players what to do, where to move, how to gesture—how to convey the plot. Murnau guided them in what they were thinking. He was known for “camera angles,” but Griffith had realized a camera cannot exist without an angle—and oblique angles, done so the character does not seem aware of being watched, allow a sense of insight. “They say I have a passion for ‘camera angles,’” said Murnau. “But I do not take trick scenes from unusual positions just to get startling effects. To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind one is watching the events on the screen…These angles help to photograph thought.”
Using Germanic literary material, this team made a world for their story that is a giddy mixture of Ufa and California. For the lake and the country scenes, they went to Lake Arrowhead (to the east of Los Angeles, in the mountains) and built a German village that might be made of gingerbread, with pointed, expressionist gables. If that felt odd, they justified the décor by turning the brunette Janet Gaynor into a blond, braided Gretchen figure, straight from German folklore.
There were many night scenes (done back at the studio), where an early and lustrous version of noir was achieved. The husband goes to meet the City Woman in a marsh, with the moon hanging in the night sky like a scaffold. The marsh is a set with an atmospheric richness and botanical detail not attempted in America before. This sequence involved beautiful, searching tracking shots (done from overhead tracks), with the husband made more sinister by having twenty-pound weights in his shoes. O’Brien was urged to act with his back, for he is often seen as a hulk crouched in menace or guilt. Meanwhile, the vamp waits at the edge of glossy water, in her city clothes. The marsh is a state of mind; the lighting is mannered, moody, and strictly controlled. You feel you are there, hesitant and anxious to see what will happen—whereas with so many American silent films, we are witnessing a tableau, a staged event, limited to a single emotional attitude. It is the difference between feeling you are at the theater and inhabiting the lifelike illusion of the movies.
In one of the most striking moments, the City Woman and the man talk of visiting the city. It appears, like a glowing mirage on the horizon, and we see the backs of the two lovers as they watch and imagine they are there, just like members of the audience. It may be one of the first images within a film that says, this, this is what the movies are about, watching and dreaming.
As befits a dream, that mood is nocturnal. But by day, the lake and the village are awash with American sunlight, which Rosher films with great tenderness. This is where you feel Murnau’s delight in America. Then it is comic and charming that what should snake out of the deep pine forest is a trolley car on tracks. This is how the husband and wife go to the city after he has revealed his murderous instinct to her in their fragile rowboat. But as the two of them sit hunched in shock and si
lence on the trolley, Murnau creates a magnificent tracking shot (a full mile of tracks was required—people said he had “unchained” the camera) in which, through the windows, we see the country turning into the city. Then we are there, in the unnamed and archetypal city (less Tilsit than Broadway, though Gliese and Murnau wanted a “universal city”). This is another masterpiece of art direction, with models, painted glass, tricked perspectives (and even dwarves to match them), and the feeling that it is a wondrous thing to put a place—its space and its atmosphere—on film.
Nothing as rich as this had been done before in American film. But the backgrounds are subtler than the interaction between the couple. It’s as if the world of a film eventually would need to deepen the human behavior. The same can be said for Victor Sjöström’s The Wind (1928), in which Lillian Gish is a tremulous Virginia girl who moves to West Texas and is tortured by the elements (as well as unkind men). The feeling for place and weather (even without the sound of the wind) is so much more penetrating than the pieties of the story line. Lillian Gish is valiant and artful in The Wind, but she is doing too much—as if guessing the story was archaic and restricted. Gish had presented the subject to Irving Thalberg and functioned as a kind of producer. The film flopped and helped close Gish’s career at M-G-M. Her natural replacement as icon and actress was Garbo, whose persona was so much more modern, inward, and flawed.
So the cinematic facility and the beauty in Sunrise keep bumping up against the film’s daft situation. We relish the night in the marsh, feeling its seductiveness and its danger, but what should we make of the film’s city? In an open boat on the lake, the wife has had every indication that her husband wants to remove her. Yet Mayer’s script and Murnau’s film ask us to believe that a day in the city (or half an hour in the movie) restores their love and trust.
The city scenes are enjoyable, but they are the part of the film where Murnau may have yielded to studio pressures. There is a “Comedy Consultant” in the credits, and there are scenes—at the barber shop, the photographic studio, the wedding they happen to observe, and the pig-catching adventure—that seem to come out of a standard American movie. So be it. Those scenes play well enough. But they contribute to the notion of the city as an expansive, amiable, and fun place, as friendly as it is lively. Nothing in this city is foreboding or indicative of real urban problems. Nothing suggests the vamp lives there, or that the city has made her. So it’s hard to ignore this question: Should the couple who have come close to falling out of love in the country move to the city to have a more fulfilling life?
Moreover, can the husband be relied on? Throughout the picture, O’Brien’s oppressive presence (his thinking) signals his violence as much as that hunched posture and the lead-footed walk. Murnau is teaching us that it can matter less in a movie what a person says than what he is. So the husband “sees the light” of sunrise, but we can’t forget his ingrained hostility, the natural grasp of a strangler’s hands, or the way he takes a knife to threaten a foolish man in the city. George O’Brien’s husband needs more than his Gretchen, their plump baby, and the pleasures of Lake Arrowhead to be made whole. He has no apparent occupation. He is idle and dangerous. What is most penetrating in Sunrise is leading it past the guidelines of a prim scenario. The film says “come to the city” and “stay in love” at a time when Hollywood was in confusion over both the town/country split in America and the condition of marriage.
Around 1920, the balance of U.S. population first moved in favor of “urban” over country. Remembering that the population at the moment of independence was about 95 percent rural and 5 percent urban, in 1920 the balance was 49 percent rural and 51 percent urban. (It is by now three-quarters urban and a quarter rural.) As a mass medium, Hollywood was deeply concerned about that shift. It was in the business of building great urban theaters (such as the Roxy, which opened in 1927), but it had to retain the rural audience, and honor its conservatism and adhering religious attitudes. At key moments in Sunrise, a church bell tolls as a sign of moral surveillance. This soundtrack, with music by Hugo Riesenfeld, was not synchronized at first, but played separately on Fox’s Movietone system.
Janet Gaynor’s wife is as vague and bright as a Madonna, and the film is loaded with disdain for the City Woman. But it can’t take its eyes off her either. As played by Margaret Livingstone, she is vivacious, quick, up-to-date, and…here’s the word: sexy. Why not? Isn’t this a movie, and isn’t looking at pretty women (from the safe dark) a terrific kick in moviegoing? That’s what distinguishes Louise Brooks in Pandora’s Box, and it is likely that her director, G. W. Pabst, had seen Sunrise. Yet silent cinema was often shy of admitting its own voyeurism. We regard Lillian Gish as a hallowed figure, but was she ever sexy, or just the figurehead of an archaic notion of virtue? Cecil B. DeMille, who became a success just as Griffith faded away, was greedy, and horny for Gloria Swanson as the new woman. The scene in Sunrise where the City Woman walks into plain view, without coyness or embarrassment, in her black underwear is a gift that says, didn’t you want to see this?
No character in Sunrise mentions divorce, but the public was already trying it. In 1900 in the United States the divorce rate was 84 per 100,000 men, and 114 for women. By the early 1930s, the figures were 489 and 572. (By 2000 they were 9,255 and 12,305.) No one would say the movies did that alone: the impact of the Depression and the wars played a part, and the overall liberation of behavior from stale rules was getting ready for feminism and gay marriage, to say nothing of divorce.
Moviemakers were well aware of the surge in divorce—but anxious not to be blamed for it. Still, the movies were a sensational public spectacle where audiences were encouraged to gaze at good-looking people (different ones every week) and dream of their chances. Sunrise is hailed now for its modernity, leading the medium into art, but it is a very old-fashioned film, harking back to the purity and deserving romantic aspirations of the young wife. Janet Gaynor is not that far removed from Lillian Gish in a film that never dares ask itself, perhaps she’s dull? (How could someone so good be dull? That is a dangerous question for every young woman.)
Well before Sunrise, Cecil B. DeMille did a series of films with “daring” titles—Don’t Change Your Husband (1919) and Why Change Your Wife? (1920)—that flirted with the possibility of divorce. As a rule, those films settled eventually for the marital status, but not before Gloria Swanson, their star, had time for amorous experiments and taking a bath. DeMille liberated the bathroom as a locale, with hot water, steam, perfume, and undress as its extras. This was an era when the sale of cosmetics for women rose rapidly. “Max Factor” (real name Maksymilian Faktorowicz) came to America from Poland, and later he moved to Los Angeles. He brought a gold called makeup. That new room in the culture, the bathroom, became a site of dreaming, a dressing room in the slow shift where so many of us became performers. In his excellent life of DeMille, Scott Eyman tells the story of C.B. urging Swanson on in a bath scene: “Prolong it! Relish the smell of the rosewater. More rapture.”
The director’s note to an actress coincides with the audience’s feeling about the promise of movies. So some spectators wanted nicer bathrooms, false eyelashes, pretty clothes in the latest styles, as well as more adventure in life. Swanson would say that “Working for Mr. DeMille was like playing house in the world’s most expensive department store.” Movies had an unstoppable affinity with shopping, and it showed in the credits for wardrobe or costume, facilities that many women had not guessed they might possess, or deserve. In 1924, Edward Steichen took a famous photograph of Swanson staring through a veil of elaborately decorated black lace. It could be the poster for the era.
As late as the early 1950s, in America and Britain, many middle-class women made their own clothes on Singer sewing machines from paper patterns. In the early years of feature filmmaking, most people bought clothes out of necessity, not for pleasure or self-expression. One revolution in films of the 1920s was not just looking at women, but also delighting in what they
were wearing, or half-wearing. So pretty women became prettier in expensive and fanciful clothing, often made out of light-catching fabrics such as charmeuse, satin, and silk. Such clothes were beyond the budget of ordinary audiences, but movies cheerfully celebrated wealth and style, and brought them within a more common range. Pretty Woman lifts off as a dream when the Julia Roberts character goes to Rodeo Drive to shop for a transforming wardrobe.
Many movies of the 1920s had increasingly slim stars in very fashionable clothes. Designers were hired in, and sometimes they were only a step away from stores and lines of clothing. What was the romance of movies but the thought of changing your life? The most important thing about Louise Brooks in America in the 1920s was not her acting, or Pandora’s Box; it was her haircut. The Oscar for costume was not introduced until 1948, but the art, the cult, and the business consequences had been current for decades.
Travis Banton (from Waco, Texas) got a start doing Mary Pickford’s wedding dress when she married Douglas Fairbanks in 1920. Then, from 1924 to 1938, he was in charge of clothes at Paramount, where he did the von Sternberg–Dietrich films, among hundreds of others. Edith Head, his assistant, would win eight Oscars for costume, and was essential to the looks of Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. More recently, we have had Milena Canonero (Barry Lyndon, Out of Africa, Damage) and Sandy Powell (Shakespeare in Love, The Aviator, Hugo). And it’s not just clothes for women: Giorgio Armani dressed Richard Gere in Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo (1980), a landmark in the right to be stylish. Perhaps it was an old habit coming back: so many of the first moguls had begun in the clothing business.
The Big Screen - The Story of the Movies Page 5
