And the first Oscar goes to…

German director F.W. Murnau’s 1927 Hollywood masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans combines showmanship, art and good acting and shows how good a silent film can be.

Sunrise won US Motion Picture Academy Awards for ‘Best Unique and Artistic Picture’, best actress, and cinematography at the first such ceremony in 1929. It was among the first feature films tracked with a synchronized musical score and sound effects: Murnau debuted Fox’s then-new Movietone sound-on-film system.

George O'Brien and Janet Gaynor in FW Murnau's Sunrise

The plot is simple: The Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston), a modish flapper in silk and satin on summer holiday in the country, tries to break up a young farm couple with a small child by stealing ‘The Man’ (George O’Brien) from ‘The Wife’ (Janet Gaynor). The story uses no names (though actors mouth the names Ansass and Indre). 

The Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston) bedevils The Man (George O'Brien) in FW Murnau's Sunrise. 

It is unclear why a stylish femme fatale wants to haul a roughhewn bumpkin back to town. Her scheme is that The Man will lose The Wife in a boating ‘accident’, sell the farm and take up the high life with her in the city. She kicks her silken heels, licks a pencil and circles a newspaper ad for a farm buyer, puffs a cigarette through cupid’s bow lips and schemes dreamily. Yet the story turns on how this ‘song of two humans’—The Man and The Wife—resolves.

Margaret Livingston as femme fatale in FW Murnau's Sunrise

Titles tell us: ‘This song of the Man and his Wife is of no place and every place; you might hear it anywhere at any time.’ And, ‘For wherever the sun rises and sets—in the city’s turmoil or under the open sky on the farm—life is much the same; sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.’

Sunrise: life 'sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet.’

But the show that follows these pronouncements takes on a life of its own. If possible, see Sunrise on a cinema screen. Shot entirely on sets in California—the film’s art direction got an Academy Award nomination—this picture makes for a visual lyric that combines the showmanship of European theater impresario Max Reinhardt, the energy of German Expressionism and the art of silent film acting.

'The City'-on one of FW Murnau's majestic sets in Sunrise. 

Reinhardt, a successful theater owner and director of operas and grand theatrical productions at the turn of the century, revolutionized the way performances were staged and trained actors and stage crew in his methods as the first German films were being made. Murnau’s grand sets, flats and lighting in Sunrise are a masterpiece of this kind of showmanship, and the camerawork, effects and editing are clean and sharp. It is hard to believe, especially from the view seen through a trolley car window first entering The City, that the entire picture is shot on contrived sets; moreover, that this entire created world was tailored to the shots that comprise the narrative.

The City at night: a married couple board a trolley on an urban set in Sunrise.

Expressionism, the late nineteenth century artistic rebellion against received notions of naturalism, had a profound effect on German art. German Expressionists rejected the mainstream idea that art derives from the objective observation of nature; they asserted the artist’s subjective reaction to it, distorting and exaggerating shape and form to express emotions and physical and sexual passion. Sunrise has literal sturm und drang; image distortions and exaggerations heighten the drama, but also alternate with figural and symbolic elements which balance the narrative.

The Woman from the City extols city living in a moonlit field.

Silent film acting is mime, a step between the spoken word and stylized conventions of dance, with a vocabulary readily accessible from everyday life. This medium ‘speaks’ through the actors’ eyes, gestures and body language. Gaynor is ideal in this role. Sunrise was one of three films that earned her the first Academy Award for an Actress in a Leading Role: the award at that time was given for an actor’s body of work in the preceding year. She made a successful transition to the talkies and was nominated for another Academy Award a decade later for her lead role in A Star Is Born (1937). The good-looking, athletic O’Brien plays in turns a hulking Frankenstein’s monster of animal passion and a fresh-faced young husband with little idea of life and women. He later played mostly supporting roles in Westerns.

Sunrise: a hulking Frankenstein’s monster of animal passion.

Among the many pleasures of this film is its array of silent comic character actors, such as The Barber (Ralph Sipperly), a ringer for Bill Murray, who shaves The Man before he gets his picture taken; The Manicure Girl (Jane Winton), a satin doll with low cleavage and ‘beauty spot’ under her left eye; and The Obtrusive Gentleman (Arthur Housman), a mustachioed masher who tries to put a move on The Wife in the barber shop.

The Barber (Ralph Sipperly) shaves The Man (George O'Brien) in Sunrise

At one point, The Man chases a tipsy runaway carnival shoat through crowded amusement park. Later the couple oblige ‘sophisticates’ with a ‘peasant dance’ that entertains onlookers swaying to the music; in a sideline vignette, one of the onlookers, an extra (Sally Eilers) whose dress straps keep slipping from her shoulders, is attended by The Obliging Gentleman (Eddie Boland). 

A tipsy carnival shoat on the loose in Sunrise.

In a scene in which a studio photographer (J. Farrell MacDonald) takes the couple’s portrait, Alfred Hitchcock fans will recognize Charles Gounod’s Marche funèbre d'une marionnette in the soundtrack after The Man inadvertently knocks over a headless classical statue and the couple worry that the fall broke off its head. Hitchcock, who met Murnau when he worked briefly at the famous UFA film studios in Berlin in the mid-1920s, reportedly heard the Funeral march in this film and later selected it as the theme for his television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

A classical figure gets a kewpie doll's head in FW Murnau's Sunrise.

The story takes the couple on an adventure that goes from harrowing to exhilarating back to harrowing, and resolves at sunrise while The Woman from the City rides off in a wagon. 


The Wife (Janet Gaynor) and The Man (George O'Brien) tie up city traffic in Sunrise.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (Sunrise) 1927 U.S., Fox Film Corp. (94 minutes). Directed by F(riedrich) W(ilhelm) Murnau; scenario by Carl Mayer adapted from Hermann Sudermann’s story The Journey to Tilsit; cinematography, Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Academy Award); art direction, Rochus Gliese (Academy Award nominee); editor, Harold D. Schuster; special effects, Frank D. Williams. (A European release with Czech titles runs 79 minutes.)

Night and the City: Am I Noir?

Night and the City 1950 U.S. Twentieth Century Fox; remastered Criterion Collection DVD released in 2015 (101 minutes). Directed by Jules Dassin; screenplay by J. D. Eisinger, from the novel by Gerald Kersh; cinematography by Mutz Greenbaum (as Max Greene); edited by Nick DeMaggio and Sidney Stone; casting by Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Weston Drury Jr.

 

As a parting gift, Daryl Zanuck gave one of his accused ‘Hollywood Communist’ directors a big budget, a top cast and a crime story to direct in London about an expatriate American ‘artist with no art’.

Richard Widmark, as Harry Fabian, the 'artist with no art' in Jules Dassin's Night and the City

The American, Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark), long on get-rich-quick schemes but ever short of funds, hatches a plot to control London’s professional wrestling circuit. If Fabian succeeds, he gets out from under his nightclub boss Philip Nosseross (Francis L. Sullivan) and outmaneuvers wrestling promoter and organized crime kingpin Kristo (Herbert Lom). His plan involves manipulating his long-suffering girlfriend Mary Bristol (Gene Tierney), his boss’s wife Helen (Googie Withers) and Kristo’s father Gregorius (Stanislaus Zbyszko), an old-time Greco-Roman wrestling champion.  

Richard Widmark, Googie Withers and Francis L. Sullivan in Night and the City:
'Oh dear boy, you'll be the death of me!'

This cast and British character actors from Kristos’s ‘boys’, his lawyer Fergus Chilk (Aubrey Dexter) and his wrestler, The Strangler (Mike Mazurki), to the street operators Anna O’Leary (Maureen Delaney), Googin the Forger (Gibb McLaughlin) and Figler, King of the Beggars (James Hayter), may be the best collection of faces any director ever shot in black and white. Zbyszko, a retired two-time world heavyweight wrestling champion in the 1920s, is a larger-than-life non-actor who nearly steals the show. 

Stanislaus Zybyszko, former champion wrestler, in Night and the City

But London critics did not like this pessimistic tale set in the London criminal underworld, shot in their town by an American director for a Hollywood studio with Widmark and Tierney in the lead roles. The film also reportedly ‘angered’ Gerald Kersh, author of the 1938 novel on which the story was based, though director Jules Dassin said he was given the script to direct without having read the book.

Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) works Helen Nosseross (Googie Withers) in Night and the City.

Since that time, Dassin’s 1950 Night and the City, a drop-dead-gorgeous masterpiece of make-believe in black and white, has been celebrated as one of the seminal works of film noir. Dassin disputed this label.

 

‘I didn’t know there was a film noir until I learned the term in France,’ Dassin said in a 2004 interview for Criterion with Issa Clubb. Blacklisted in Hollywood, the former American studio director established himself in France where he made the urban heist classic Rififi (1955) in the twilight between the Second World War and the Nouvelle Vague.

Hard to resist a pretty lady in Jules Dassin's Rififi

‘When Rififi came out, [the critics] talked about how I was indebted to a film made by John Huston called Asphalt Jungle [1950] and how they were similar,’ Dassin said. ‘Now, word of honor, I had not seen Asphalt Jungle until I read about all this and I still don’t see the connection, except for one story element: a guy’s undone because he couldn’t resist pretty girls—or ladies. But that’s all,’ he said in the 2004 interview. 

Hard to resist a pretty lady in John Huston's Asphalt Jungle

Postwar French film intellectuals enthused over the hard-boiled Hollywood crime stories shot in black and white in the narcotic American night and coined them film noir. It was a style of filmmaking that contemporary German film theorist Siegfried Kracauer and others associated with German Expressionism.

German Expressionism: Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari Robert Weine (1919)

But Lotte Eisner, an early German film critic, traced the style to more practical roots, beginning with European theater legend Max Reinhardt. A trained actor, Reinhardt became a successful theater owner and impresario of operas and grand theatrical productions at the turn of the century. He revolutionized the way operas and plays were staged and trained actors and stage crew in his methods at the time when the first German films were being made. Eisner also credits the influence of early naturalistic Danish film directors and elements of German Romanticism. 

Max Reinhardt in Hollywood: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935)

In her book The Haunted Screen, Eisner noted that Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin, for example, was famous for its revolving stage and elaborate sets. But she said that a shortage of raw materials and limited budgets in the latter part of the First World War inspired Reinhardt to substitute lighting for set décor. Reinhardt also directed several early films (Sumurûn, 1910; Die Insel der Seligen, 1913). Given this practical background, German film directors already were familiar with chiaroscuro effects and had no need to rely on what the Expressionists were doing, Eisner wrote.

Otto Rippert's 'pioneer work' Homunculus (1916)--Lotte Eisner 

‘Proof can be found in the serial film Homunculus [Otto Rippert, 1916] which, made as it was long before [Das Kabinett des Dr] Caligari [Robert Weine, 1919], has not had the attention it deserves. In this pioneer work, the contrasts between black and white, the collisions between light and shade—all the classical elements of the German film, from Der Müde Tod (Destiny) [1921] to Metropolis [1926—both by Fritz Lang]—are already present,’ she wrote.

 

Lang and many of the film professionals who began their careers in the German system where film was regarded an art—Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, William Dieterle and Robert Siodmak, for instance—emigrated to the Hollywood film studios in the Nazi period. Thus perhaps in a similar practical sense, the way film noir looks owes as much to Reinhardt, taking root in the Southern California desert in the 1930s and becoming a staple of the way studios made films that flourished as American art.

Gene Tierney as Mary Bristol, Harry Fabian's long-suffering girlfriend in Night and the City

Though as Dassin said of film noir in the 2004 interview: ‘You know, sometimes we know not what we do. It just happens.’

 

In addition to a high definition digital transfer of the original print, the Criterion Collection DVD released in 2015 includes both the U.S. 95 min. release and longer U.K. release reviewed here, as well as a June 1970 interview of Dassin by Paul Seban for the French television show L’invité du dimanche and the 2004 Criterion interview.

Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour 2017 U.K. (125 minutes) directed by Joe Wright; written by Anthony McCarten; director of photography, Bruno Delbonnel; casting by Jina Jay.

Gary Oldman brings Winston Churchill to life via Churchill’s language, the central ‘character’ in Darkest Hour, with the support of an outstanding cast working with a great script, but the film’s direction and lighting leave much to be desired.

 The ‘darkest hour’ came in 1940 at that moment in history when Nazi Germany appeared poised to conquer the European continent and threaten the British Isles, despite desperate diplomatic moves by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and others to avoid a second ruinous world war. Darker yet in some circles was the prospect and necessity of replacing Chamberlain with Churchill, an aristocratic speechifying senior politician right about Adolf Hitler, but wrong in a trail of policy decisions going back to the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in the First World War.

Oldman earned his Best Actor Academy Award for Darkest Hour in a role tough not to caricature. He seems to have learned a thing or two from George Smiley. We have not seen a better movie Winston Churchill, and many lesser bluff mimics. Oldman and the cast’s acting stands out because they made an ensemble piece around Churchill’s language: the script is written to Churchill’s language in that it is structured to his speeches; the subsidiary roles support it; the movie even closes with a direct reference to it. 

Lily James as Elizabeth Layton, Churchill’s typist-midwife,

However, apart from the stellar writing, casting and acting, the movie is a bad job. The subject needed something quieter and less Crowded With Import, such as the way Tom Hooper handled The King’s Speech (2010), an equally large—and contemporary—tale. Darkest Hour tells a tremendous story and, as in The King’s Speech, these actors, from Oldman and Kristin Scott-Thomas as Clementine Churchill, to Lily James as Elizabeth Layton, Churchill’s typist-midwife, through the entire cast, had the chops to carry it. Susanna White’s excellent Parade’s End (2012) also comes to mind.


Kristin Scott-Thomas as Clementine Churchill, with Winston

The most glaring problem is the lighting. It is entirely too white. We thought first that Oldman should have been made up a touch pinker: Churchill was ruddy by nature and drank habitually, yet for the most part looks an awfully pasty white in the film. On a rewatch, it is the lighting that pales him. These actors would have looked marvelous in a softer and more nuanced light. The other part of this is that there is nearly no chiaroscuro: the actors either were blasted by unfiltered beams, or barely visible in the gloaming. The lighting also artificially ‘dates’ the colours, antiquing them to make them look like colours retouched in photographs before this historical period, closer to the turn of the 20th century.

Beyond this, the music booms and the framing of the picture looks overwrought and televisiony, making it ring phony and pretentious. This is entirely unnecessary. There are several choreographed slow-motion ‘person’-in-the-street floatersby scenes in which urban pedestrians and workers pass before the viewer (Churchill, being driven round London) a lot more slowly than one should expect to see them from a moving automobile, even in London traffic. These may have been someone’s idea of ‘art’; it read like an advertisement. And when Churchill takes the London Underground to work for the first time in his life to engage with everyday Britons, the preponderance of women and a young black man as his fellow passengers, though possibly historical, seemed a note strained to exhibit a gratuitous multi-culti bona fide. This kind of ‘artistic’ fiddling distracts from rather than enhances the story.


How the other 99% lives: Churchill rides the Tube to work.

These infelicities aside, this movie is worth seeing because the cast bonds and makes the script sing as they tell the tale.