About Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
The story behind the film
After the international success of films like Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, the German director F. W. Murnau was lured to Hollywood by William Fox, who gave him enormous resources and creative freedom. Sunrise was his first American film. Carl Mayer, Murnau's regular writer, adapted it from Hermann Sudermann's short story "The Excursion to Tilsit".
The characters don't even have names. A farmer — the Man — is infatuated with a vacationing Woman from the City, who urges him to drown his Wife, sell the farm and run away with her. He takes his Wife across the lake intending to kill her, but can't go through with it. Terrified, she flees to the city on a trolley, and he follows. Over one long day in the city, the couple rediscover their love — before a storm on the journey home puts everything at risk.
Sunrise was released with a synchronised orchestral score and sound effects using Fox's new Movietone sound-on-film system, making it one of the first features with a recorded soundtrack, though it has no spoken dialogue.
Cast & crew
- Directed by F. W. Murnau; scenario by Carl Mayer
- George O'Brien as the Man
- Janet Gaynor as the Wife
- Margaret Livingston as the Woman from the City
- Cinematography by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss
- Art direction by Rochus Gliese
Why it's worth watching
Many critics consider Sunrise the most beautiful film of the silent era, and some call it the greatest. Murnau tells the story almost entirely in images, with very few title cards. The camera glides through marshes in the moonlight, follows the couple through traffic, and floats above a crowded amusement park. Dreamlike superimpositions show the Man's tormented thoughts. The vast city set used forced perspective — full-sized buildings and people in the foreground, smaller sets and figures behind — to create the illusion of an enormous metropolis.
But it's the emotion that makes it last. The scene in which the couple, reconciled, wander into a church wedding and he weeps with shame, or the joyous day they spend at a photographer's, a barber's and a fairground, are as moving now as they were in 1927.
Fun facts
- At the very first Academy Awards in 1929, Sunrise won for "Unique and Artistic Picture" (a category used only that year), Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress award (shared with two other films), and Rosher and Struss won for cinematography.
- The score includes Charles Gounod's "Funeral March of a Marionette", later famous as the theme of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
- Sunrise was among the first 25 films chosen for the National Film Registry in 1989.
Public-domain status
Sunrise was published in 1927, so its US copyright has expired and it is in the public domain in the United States; its original 1927 Movietone score was published with it. See "Rights & source" below.