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.)