Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

The longer review

After Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Fox brought F. W. Murnau to Hollywood and gave him a large budget and a free hand. Sunrise is what he made with them, and it's often called the most beautiful film of the silent era.

The story is simple, almost a fable. A farmer, known only as the Man (George O'Brien), is having an affair with a woman from the city who urges him to drown his wife and sell the farm. He takes his wife (Janet Gaynor) out on the lake in a rowboat, and at the last moment he can't do it. She flees, terrified, onto a trolley to the city, and he follows her. Over the course of one long day there, they find their way back to each other.

What makes the film is how it moves. Murnau's camera follows the Man through a marsh at night to his lover, glides along with the trolley as the countryside turns into city, and drifts through a crowded amusement park. Huge sets with forced perspective make the city feel vast. Double exposures show what the characters imagine. The visual style says what the film doesn't need intertitles for, and there are very few of them.

Janet Gaynor won the first Academy Award for Best Actress, given partly for this role, and you can see why: her shift from terror to forgiveness is carried almost entirely in her face. The last stretch, a storm on the lake on the way home, ties everything together with real suspense. Some find the plot too sentimental. We think it earns every bit of it.

Before you watch

Sunrise was released with a synchronized Movietone score and sound effects, so look for a version with that track. It entered the US public domain at the start of 2023.