The German director F. W. Murnau thought big; for his first American film, “Sunrise,” from 1927, he had a mile-long trolley track laid from the suburbs to the city and filmed from the perspective of the short train that ran on it. For his third—to be titled “Our Daily Bread” and which, like “Sunrise,” would also contrast urban and rural life—he wanted to film on location in Chicago, and he actually purchased a farm in Oregon in order to film in its wheat fields. He wanted to show, as promised by the title, the step-by-step process of the making of bread, from the growing and harvesting of wheat through the manufacture of flour to the work of bakers to the delivery of loaves to the city. His intention was to see the hidden labor on which urban life is based; he thought that the alienating chill of the city was a result of its insulation from the source of its sustenance.
After the commercial failure of “Sunrise,” Murnau’s studio, Fox, forced him to scale down his ambitious plans. The movie (which I discuss in the clip above) was retitled “City Girl”; its sequences set in Chicago were shot in the studio; and the movie was pared back to the dramatic essence of its story, about a young farmer who goes to town, meets a waitress, marries her, and brings her home, to the dismay of his tyrannical father. Then, for its 1929 release, by which time talking pictures had become all the rage, the studio added a dialogue track and cut the movie to about an hour.
In recent years, Murnau’s fuller, silent cut has resurfaced; it was released on DVD last year in the massive “Murnau, Borzage and Fox” boxed set. Though one can dream of what’s missing, the film that remains is still to be savored. Its aesthetic is sparer and starker than that of “Sunrise”; where that film tended toward the mythic, “City Girl” reflects Murnau’s interest in the particular and the concrete, and he directs with a stark clarity that seems to suggest the coming styles of the era of talkies.
P.S. Murnau’s second American film, “4 Devils,” is lost; the Fox Box features a sumptuously illustrated book about it, by Janet Bergstrom.
