Sunrise - A Song of Two Humans

Customer Reviews:

The sun also rises..........2007-01-22

Never had a silent film struck so loud a chord as that which is made in "Sunrise".

Directed by FW Murnau and released by Fox Films (before they merged with 20th Century Studios), this is one of the most impressive films of the silent era. If "Citizen Kane" showcased all the tools in the filmmaker's box in the early sound era, this does the same for silent films.

The plot is deceptively simple. A Man, who lives on a farm with his wife, A Woman, and their son, A Child, meets a A Woman From the City (no one has names in this... really!). He has an affair with her, and she eventually convinces him to kill his wife so they can sell the farm and move to the City to live. She concocts for him a plan where he rows his wife out into the middle of the lake they live near and drowns her.

The Man agrees to this plan, but when the time comes, as he looms over his wife and she cowers in fear, he finds he can't do it, and the two travel to the City together, where they are reminded of why they fell in love in the first place.

As said, the plot is somewhat simple, but the same cannot be said for the direction and the sets. Murnau, famed for movies such as "Nosferatu" and "Faust" was hired by William Fox to come to America and make four movies, of which this was the first (and probably the best, though "Four Devils" was supposed to be sensational and is, alas, a Lost Movie).

Murnau, who was a major force in German film, brought to the studio all his gifts as a filmmaker. When you watch the movie look at the early trick photography that was used to create a split-screen view (they put tape on one side of the film, shot that image, and then put tape on the other side and shot that image to crea a split-screen effect), or watch the way the camera follows the Man as he goes to meet the Woman From the City out near the lake.

Just as amazing are the sets, surreal and grand in their design. Look at the first view of the City, where you see an amazing street view, with impossible angles that can't exist in real life. A lot of this was accomplished by having painted sets with normal adults in the foreground and midgets and children in the background to give an illusion of largeness.

To call it a silent film isn't really even accurate. At this point Hollywood had began to experiment with early sound technology, and "Sunrise" actually had a soundtrack, though it was composed entirely of music and limited sound effects. It won't blow away your sound system, but it adds a nice touch, particularly when a tune familiar to all begins to play. You won't know it by name, but it's called "Funeral March of the Marionettes", and you've heard it before, trust me.

"Sunrise" was nominated for awards at the very first Academy Awards. It went home with Best Actress for Janet Gaynor (who later said had she realized how important the award would become, she would have enjoyed it more, rather than swooning over Douglas Fairbanks as he gave it to her), and an award for "Special Artistic Achievement", which was never awarded to any other movie. For the curious a film called "Wings" took home Best Picture and is widely regarded as very inferior.

The film is both easy and impossible to describe. It really needs to be witnessed for itself. Your local Blockbuster won't have a copy, but the library probably does (though probably on VHS). The film was released a couple years ago on DVD as part of 20th Century Fox's "Studio Classics" line. Sadly, though, they didn't give it a general release and you had to send in proofs-of-purchase from other DVD's to get it. Or you can do what I did, and buy a copy off Ebay for about $15. It's well worth it.

The best artistic picture of 1927 still is worth watching.......2006-12-21

There is nothing special about the story behind this movie. A farmer (George O'Brien) is attracted by a vamp from the City (Margaret Livingston) who seduces him and has gradually had him selling his farm off piece by piece to provide presents for her. She finally suggests that he leave his failing farm altogether and return with her to the City. However, to complete the plan, he will need to drown his country wife(Janet Gaynor). A few days later, the farmer takes his wife for a trip to the city. As he rows his wife across the lake that is between their village and the trolley, he comes close to doing away with her. However, always a reluctant partner in this plan, he recoils in horror and rows the boat to the shore, his wife unharmed. The wife, having seen the murder in her husband's eyes, jumps onto the trolley to the city with her husband in hot pursuit. Once in the city, he reassures her that he would not harm her, and he begins to feel real remorse for his previous actions. They slip into a church and watch a wedding ceremony going on, and in doing so begin to reconnect to one another. By the end of the day, they've fallen in love again; the man remembering why it was he married his wife in the first place. However, when a storm breaks out on their way back across the lake, the wife falls out of the boat. The farmer goes for help and the entire village looks for her, hoping she has not been drowned in the storm. This simplistic story could easily have been transformed into a hackneyed melodrama. What makes Sunrise a great film, though, is the majesty and tenderness F.W. Murnau managed to give it without the benefit of audible conversation.

Particularly intriguing is the set of the unnamed "City". If the traffic patterns shown in this movie are indicative of traffic laws in the 1920's it's a wonder anybody made it to or from work alive. Early autos, horse-drawn carriages, and people all chaotically race through the streets without rhyme or reason. Also wondrous are the night shots of the Coney Island-style amusement park where the farmer and his wife go for some fun before returning home as well as the view of the trolley ride and and the glide following the farmer through the moonlit marsh. This truly was the "Best Artistic Picture" of the year.

A little known fact is that Sunrise was the first feature film to use sound-on-film techniques. There were fully synchronized sounds of automobiles, church bells, crowds, and other effects. Unfortunately, "The Jazz Singer" was released shortly after Sunrise, and Sunrise failed at the box office. Time, however, has had a different judgement. Today, "The Jazz Singer" is mainly remembered for ushering in the age of the talkie. Likewise, "Wings" which won the first Best Picture "Oscar", is largely remembered for its aerial stunts, for which it also won an engineering award. Sunrise, however, is still appreciated as a whole motion picture experience, not just a temporary technical triumph that has faded as other technical triumphs take its place.

Beautiful Drama.......2006-12-14

Sunrise is one of the most beloved silent films of all time. Although it might not be as well known as Chaplin's comedies, it is a highly artistic drama and proof that the silent era film makers were capable of greatness. The story surrounds a man and a wife who used to be inseparable and completely in love. A woman from the city tore them apart and now he is contemplating murdering his wife to be with his lover. However, his love for his wife, no matter how much the city girl overshadows it, is stronger than anything else and makes it impossible for him to betray her.

This film is very artistic and won a special Oscar for its achievements. It certainly is one of the most advanced of the silent era and was made in a year when films were at their pinnacle. The blue screen use is a bit obvious, but advanced for the time period. Also, the use of cross-cutting and other trick photography makes the movie fun to watch outside of the storyline. Even the title cards are artistic with a strange font and animation. There is also the use of sound effects outside of the normal music score.

Aside from these things, the film is impressive because of the acting. Janet Gaynor won the best actress Oscar for her performance (against two of her other wonderful roles). Her sweetness and deep hurt radiate over the screen. George O'Brien plays excellently off of her and brings a complex character to life.

Melodramatic Parable Evolves Beautifully Into a Silent Masterpiece.......2006-05-03

Even though there are heavily melodramatic moments as well as trivial, excisable ones (note the runaway pig), this 1927 masterwork by German expressionistic filmmaker F.W. Murnau is still an impressive piece of silent cinema released just days before the arrival of the breakthrough talkie, "The Jazz Singer". It does seem a shame that the sound revolution made films as expressive as "Sunrise" obsolete just as film auteurs like Murnau, Chaplin (1931's "City Lights") and Carl Theodor Dreyer (1928's "Le Passion de Jeanne d'Arc") were reaching their artistic peaks. "Sunrise" is essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand how emotionally resonant silent cinema can be when directed by a master of the form.

Adapted by Carl Mayer from a German short story, the fable-like plot revolves around three unnamed characters - a farmer, his wife and a woman from the city. Feeling stagnant in his marriage, the farmer embarks on an affair with the city woman who is on holiday in the country. The melodramatic elements of the story fall into place as the woman suggests the farmer kill his wife and sell his farm to move with her to the city. He nervously goes through the steps to take his wife out on a boat in order to drown her in what he will design as an accident. His true feelings for his wife intervene but not before his wife, realizing his intention, runs away into the city. He chases her and makes amends, and together, they have a spirited, romantic adventure in the city. With their marriage solidified, they encounter a storm when they take the boat back to the farm, and then fate takes its hand on the three characters.

The most startling aspect of the movie is the visual element which carries through the same stylized exaggeration of Murnau's German classics, "Nosferatu" and "The Last Laugh". Far more than the simple storyline or even the acting, the shimmering cinematography by Karl Struss and Charles Rosher and the impressive art direction headed by Rochus Gliese are what resonate today, as they all serve to add emotional weight to what is essentially an anti-adultery parable. The most impressive sets are of the realistic-looking city captured with all its pervasive impatience and scarifying traffic, and in particular, the Luna Park amusement park abuzz with futuristic rides and hedonistic crowds. A couple of impressive scenes involve the farmer and his wife oblivious to the traffic as they rekindle their love amid honking horns and piling vehicles.

Overall there is an impressive use of deep shadows and exaggerated set pieces to mirror the inner feelings of the characters. Even though it is a silent, the soundtrack on the DVD has the original orchestral score and effective sound effects to help bring another dimension to the story. Just twenty years old, Janet Gaynor uses her innocent manner and porcelain look to strong advantage as the wife, but it is the little-remembered George O'Brien who turns in the film's most powerful performance as the farmer, especially in his guilt-ridden plea for forgiveness outside the church where they witnessed a wedding. To her credit, Margaret Livingston plays the other woman with relative subtlety even though she is dolled up as a Louise Brooks-look-alike flapper.

The 2003 DVD has a terrific set of extras starting with informative commentary by cinematographer John Bailey, a protege of the film's main cinematographer Struss. He also contributes remarks to ten minutes worth of outtakes that have been miraculously saved in the studio vaults. There is a forty-minute partial reconstruction of Murnau's 1928 lost film with Gaynor, "Four Devils", made up completely of stills and drawings and a narrative track. Production stills and the original trailer for "Sunrise" complete the extras.

A Silent Masterpiece with Even Better Extras.......2006-02-07

Sunrise won three statuettes at the first Academy Awards (It wouldn't be called Oscar for another decade). Including one of the two Best Picture categories - Most Unique and Artistic Production, Best Cinematography and shared the Best Actress award for Janet Gaynor.

Janet is a young blonde farmer's wife. She is happy with life on the farm but her husband gets a taste of life off the farm. He is seduced by a big city siren but the only way he could be with her is to kill his wife. This becomes a morality play. Will he or won't he drown his wife. This is a simple but stunningly beautiful film that you will not forget.

DVD EXTRAS:
Commentary by cinematographer John Bailey

Outtakes with commentary by Bailey - 10 minutes of outtakes with commentary - These are mostly alternate takes or master shot or just bits of film that were found.

Outtakes with title cards - Mostly the same as before but using introduction title cards for each scene.

Original Scenario by Carl Mayer with annotations by director FW Murnau

Original Screenplay

Restoration Notes - A brief history of the film with notes on the restoration process.

Murnau's Lost Film: Four Devils - 40 minute featurette about Murnau's lost film using original script, production drawings and other materials. This is really interesting and like the narrator, I would hope that the film is found.

Four Devils Treatment
Four Devils Screenplay

THIS IS THE BEST SET OF EXTRAS EVER!!!

Average customer rating:

City lights!
Melodramatic Parable Evolves Beautifully Into a Silent Masterpiece
To Heck with 19th Century Fox
A SILENT MASTERPIECE COMES EXQUISITELY TO LIFE .....
PROTOTYPE

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
Starring: George O'Brien , Janet Gaynor , Margaret Livingston , Bodil Rosing , and J. Farrell MacDonald
Director: F.W. Murnau
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

( S ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
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ASIN: B00003CX6D

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There are those who rate Sunrise the greatest of all silent films. Then again, some consider it the finest film from any era. Such claims invite a backlash, but do yourself a favor and give it a look. At the very least, you'll know you've seen a movie of extraordinary visual beauty and emotional purity. This universal tale of a farm couple's journey from country to city and back again was the first American film for F.W. Murnau, the German director of Nosferatu and The Last Laugh whose everyday scenes seemed haunted by phantoms and whose most extravagant visions never lost touch with reality. Hollywood afforded him the technical resources to unleash his imagination, and in turn he opened up the power of camera movement and composition for a generation of American filmmakers. You'll never forget the walk in the swamp, the ripples on the lake, the trolley ride from forest to metropolis. This movie defines the cinema. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews:

City lights!.......2007-08-20

Most of films of the great directors are multidimensional in its significance. This immortal gem of the cinema couldn't be the exception.

On one hand, it may be regarded as a romantic triangle with attempts to murder, but this reading would be flat, because Murnau pursuits to surmount the simple anecdote; in this sense the arrival to the city and the arouse illusions as guarantee of a new and better world to live remains in our minds afeter leaving the hall.

But the difference is the transcendence of this brilliant movie resides in the purity and if you may naïf convictions of this couple that keeps a curisous resemblance with Tabu. Because to emigrate from the province to the big city it's not so far respect to emigrant from a paradisiacal island to the modern civilization. Moreover, if we scrutinize with major zealousness around the origins of the Italian Neo realism, most of critics agree in Jean Renoir's Tony was the first seed, but this story is narrowly linked ij spirit and intention with this movement.

This film still stands out as one the most superb movies ever made; a portentous artistic document for the new filmmakers to come.

Melodramatic Parable Evolves Beautifully Into a Silent Masterpiece.......2006-05-03

To Heck with 19th Century Fox.......2005-02-19

Apparently Fox Home Video thought a great way to force serious cinephiles frothing at the mouth for a remastered edition of Murnau's Sunrise was to package it with three other films that can't hold a candle to it. I don't want those other films, I want Sunrise damnit! I encourage anybody with an entrepreneurial spirit to sell me just the Sunrise DVD sold in that box set. I got thirty bucks on it.

A SILENT MASTERPIECE COMES EXQUISITELY TO LIFE ............2005-01-28

SUNRISE --- directed by F.W.Murnau --- was a commercial flop when first released in 1927, but is now recognised as one of the greatest, if not the greatest Silent Film ever made. Depending upon which books you read, it rivals Carl Dreyer's THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC as the No.1 Silent Film. Upon its release it met with almost total disdain from the American public who could not relate to the brooding Germanic atmosphere, and the simple, almost banal story.
A peasant farmer is seduced by the Woman from the City who talks him into drowning his wife and running off to the Big City. The farmer tries, when rowing across a lake, but just cannot do it. The wife flees in terror, jumps on a trolley-car and rides to the City, with the farmer just sitting staring at her.
This sequence is one of many fabulous " mood setters " in this film, and is one of Silent Cinema's most famous sequences, as the rural lakside, country pastures silently turn into the outskirts and then the centre of the City.
The rest of the film concentrates upon their gradual re-awakening to each other and then one the way home, across the lake by moonlight, fate takes a sinister and totally unexpected hand, leading to an emotionally heightened climax. If you are of intellectual bent, you could sneer at this beautiful and haunting film ... but if you are an emotionally responsive person, you will need a large box of tissues ............
Janet Gaynor who plays the Wife, won the Academy's very first Best Actress Award, ( although it was not called that at the time ). The film is famous for its brilliant atmospheric camera work and brilliantly set mood lighting .... especially the Man's tramping through the swamp to keep his moonlight tryst with the seductive Woman.
Not only did the public not understand this film, but its release by 20th Century Fox was unkowingly very ill-advised. Just a few weeks after the release of SUNRISE, Warner Bros flung THE JAZZ SINGER on to the world ... and the rest, as we all know, is cinematic history.
Another note of historical and scholarly interest is that SUNRISE is actually the FIRST feature-length film in which the human voice is heard. Many films up to this time had recorded musical soundtracks and sound effects. In SUNRISE, when the Wife and the Man reach the end of the trolley-car in the middle of the bustling and fast moving traffic in the City, the wife jumps out in fear and runs right into the middle of the traffic which seems to be going in all directions. You hear on the soundtrack, motor horns blaring and ther angry cries of motorists -- " get off the road", what do you think you are doing ? ", " get outta here ", etc. But not too many people heard it and a few weeks later THE JAZZ SINGER was released and .. we ain't heard anything, yet.
Another " claim to fame " of this film is that it is also considered to be the " grandaddy " of film noir, with its look and feel firmly set in Germanic Expressionist mode, and the birth of the femme fatale in film noir.
This sublime, beautifully filmed and sensitivly, sincerely acted film is one that will haunt you for a long time after viewing, and you will want to see it again and again.
And now we can in this MAGNIFICENT DVD transfer from Twentieth centry Fox. The film has been miraculously restored and remastered. All the prints I had seen previously and elsewhere, and the VHS videos I have of it from the USA and the UK are all faded and fuzzy, though very watchable and understandable. But now this DVD offers SUNRISE as it has never been seen before -- except perhaps upon its original release. Now we can see the lighting effects as they are presented in those beautiful photographs in film books. Now all levels of this are perceived and the viewing becomes an unforgettable cinematic experience.
With this DVD you have a choice of two soundtracks. One being the original Movietone soundtrack, and the other being a modern composition. I personally prefer the original. Firstly because that is the way the film was presented and meant to be seen. I also found that the other soundtrack eliminated the original sound effects, and unfortunately for my taste, like most other modern compositions to accompany Silent Film, the films seem to exist merely to accompany the new musical soundtrack and NOT vice-versa.
There is also a silent trailer for the film, and that is a novelty ... and other features to make this a treasured DVD in any collection. The one about the set designs and establishment of mood and matching shots is fascinating.
This is one of the greatest films, offered on one of the greatest DVD transfers around. if you love and know Silent Film, you won't need to be told to buy this DVD. If not sure, just buy it anyway. You won't regret it. I bought it -- ( I actually have two, one is a backup ), and watched this film over and over again.
Thank you Twentieth Century Fox for reincarnating and helping countless numbers of people to discover and re-discover this mesmerising and unforgettable film.

PROTOTYPE.......2004-10-02

I largely agree with William T. Jameson. What modern viewers don't realize is how influential this film became in Hollywood. If Murnau had lived longer, he might have become as powerful a force in movies as Hitchcock became, and it would have been largely due to the fact that both trained in German silent cinema techniques, which involved evocation of mood from pictoral composition and set lighting. After Sunrise, feature after feature capitalized on or borrowed one or another of the many effects Murnau invented.

Today, the scholarly view says that with this film Murnau invented the "Woman's Picture." A new genre? Makes no sense to me if you look at so many of Griffeth's features. Nevertheless, as beautiful as Daybreak is, it is revolutionary in the sense that it is an unusual display of cinematographer's craft in the sence that most of the takes are extremely long, establishing a kind of visual rhythm that carries us, as a musical theme does, through the story that is simple, overall, but profoundly complex in its details.

A great, emotional masterpiece. Nobody who wants to build a cinema library should be without a copy.

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