City Girl, F. W. Murnau's last Hollywood film, doesn't have nearly the reputation of Sunrise, his first one, but it is in some respects a greater work and a more exciting one -- if only because one can see in it Murnau's road to the future as a Hollywood director, if he'd lived and chosen to remain one.
It has many themes in common with Sunrise, though here they are sometimes inverted. A beleaguered city girl dreams of a more decent and hopeful life in the country, meets a decent country guy who takes her off there -- and discovers the same oppression, in a different form, among the wheatfields.
What the films have in common is a concern with good, simple people who fall in love and whose love is tested by the meanness of the world around them. In Sunrise the characters are iconic, almost symbolic of the virtues they possess -- they rise above stereotypes only through the charm of the players. But the characterizations of City Girl are naturalistic, particularized, sharply observed -- greatly aided by excellent dialogue in the intertitles.
Charles Farrell and Mary Duncan are brilliant in their roles. Farrell has the same combination of sweetness and virility that makes George O'Brien such an appealing hero, and Duncan's carefully calculated balance of hardboiled city dame and innocent dreamer is masterful. She is the heart of the film and her experience drives it. It's an oddly feminist vision -- the meanness of the world on exhibit here is mainly reflected in an abuse of and disrespect for women -- and Duncan's heroic resistance to this is thrilling, and startling. We would not see this kind of female response to male abuse on screen in Hollywood again until the Sixties, when it appeared in a brittle, dogmatic form far removed from the heartfelt indignation of City Girl.
Along with the naturalism of the characterizations, more in line with American style than the grave symbolism of Sunrise, is a less fevered visual method -- one that doesn't announce its aesthetic ambitions quite so loudly but that still often soars to heights of brilliance. The long tracking shot through the wheatfield when Farrell and Duncan first arrive at the farm, filled with hope and joy, is perhaps not as complex technically as the moody track through the moonlit swamp in Sunrise, but it's just as exhilarating as a piece of plastic invention and serves its dramatic moment with the same stunning efficiency and elan.
The shots of the wheat harvest with the mule-drawn machinery are equally exhilarating, lyrical, powerful. They offer an image of timeless, ennobling labor which contrasts profoundly with the individual pettiness of the human characters who are operating the machines.
I think it's fair to see City Girl as Murnau's first experimental step in creating a genuinely American style -- one that might pass muster among the conventional but canny minds who directed the studios, among audiences of everyday moviegoers not especially enamored of the European art-house mode . . . and yet one that could still incorporate his unique plastic imagination and convey his deeply humane concerns.
It's one of Murnau's great films, one of the great silent films, one of the great films -- its place in history, in the shadow of Sunrise, is wholly undeserved.