The Big Screen (5 page)

Such a mission went against the flow of traffic. Ernst Lubitsch had come from Germany to direct Mary Pickford in 1923. His star in Germany, Pola Negri, followed later the same year. Another director, F. W. Murnau, was about to start
Sunrise
in America. Erich Stroheim had left Austria before the Great War (and before the “von” in his name) and been an assistant to Griffith on
The Birth of a Nation
. The director Mauritz Stiller and his actress Greta Garbo had been imported from Sweden by Louis B. Mayer. In April 1930, Marlene Dietrich sailed on the
Bremen
to New York to join the director who had picked her out for
The Blue Angel
, Josef von Sternberg. She was put under contract at the same Paramount at $1,750 a week.

Derived from works by the German playwright Frank Wedekind,
Pandora's Box
is the story of Lulu, a prostitute and a reckless spirit in the German gloom. There is no daylight in the film, yet Lulu's white body glows like a bulb with the energy that fights her fate. She is a wanton who abandons conquests as a bored lion leaves one carcass for another. The film carries her all the way from the authority figure of Dr. Schon to a pale Jack the Ripper, who rids her of her life.

Although she spoke no German, and had little idea what the film was about, Brooks is riveting—sensual, funny, tragic, all at the same time. She would say later that Pabst (with whom she had a one-night stand) dismissed sex as a myth. “It was sexual hate that engrossed his whole being with its flaming reality.” You may read the film now as a feminist statement, but who knew that at the time? What is most striking is that this is a film—impossible to be made in America because of its psychological candor and pessimism—that says,
Look
, look at her, look at the light on her flesh, and see this great beauty destroyed. In 1929, Pabst believed
Pandora's Box
needed the spontaneity of an American actress who didn't give a fuck for the careerism that had driven Mary Pickford.

Pandora's Box
is now regarded as one of the great silent films, deserving a place in the pantheon. As with Carl Dreyer's
The Passion of Joan of Arc
(1928), we hardly notice the lack of sound because the film's inward life is so intense. The sensuality is its intimacy. Falconetti's Joan is a “good girl,” but the screen presence of the two women is not so far apart. They insist on our entering their heads and their dreams. So Louise Brooks, for one film, is among the immortals because, in an age of widespread romantic posing, her very look asks, “Isn't this about sex?”

Yet she did not even see the picture until the 1950s. She stayed in Germany for one more film with Pabst, and then limped back to America. When
Pandora's Box
opened in New York late in 1929 (cut by nearly a third, with a tacked-on “happy” ending),
Variety
declared, “Better for Louise Brooks had she been contented exhibiting that supple form in two-reel comedies or light Paramount features.” Behave yourself!

Another review spoke of her “passive decorativeness,” which leaves one marveling at how some eyes and nervous systems malfunction. Brooks would estimate in the late 1950s that she had earned barely $100,000 from all her movies. By then she was the backstairs mistress to powerful men, a charity case, and a budding writer, ending up in Rochester, New York, alone in a small apartment, uncertain whether a new generation would rediscover her. The vexed Pabst (he wanted more than one night but was horrified by all her other lovers) had warned her she would end up like Lulu.

The director couldn't grasp his own point. But you can see
Pandora's Box
any day, and its glow is damp still, as if Lulu has just had sex. She looks at the camera in her insolent way—existing, not acting—and she guesses we're there and what furtive, naughty dreamers we are in our dark. Amid the birth of a nation and a medium, a business and even an art, that's why people were going to the movies: to be voyeurs in the dark beholding an orgy of their own desires burning on the screen.

More than eighty years after it was made, the movie
Sunrise
(1927) is regarded as a major achievement, a monument to silent cinema, and a landmark in personal expression, all the more pointed or poignant in that it seems both American and German.

In 1958, when the magazine
Cahiers du Cinéma
asked its writers to name the best films ever made,
Sunrise
took first place. In the 2002 critics' poll organized by
Sight & Sound
,
Sunrise
placed eighth, one position below
Battleship Potemkin
(1925). That estimate surely grows out of the scholars' feeling that
Sunrise
is a Germanic lesson in America and a signal meeting of art with commerce. Can we reconcile those two attitudes? What do we think of
Sunrise
today? Is the picture stranded in history, or vital to where we are now? If that seems a tough test for a “classic,” remember how progress abandons so many movies—leaving the historians looking like nostalgic chumps. Sensationalism at the movies happens now, not later.

We owe
Sunrise
to William Fox, who radically altered the life of its maker, F. W. Murnau (and may have hastened his death), out of his longing to have “a German genius” working for him. As Wilhelm Fried, born in Hungary in 1879, “Fox” was of German-Jewish descent. His name survives today in Fox Broadcasting and the Rupert Murdoch kingdom, with a mixture of notoriety and influence he might have enjoyed. His parents brought him to New York when he was only an infant, and at the age of eleven he quit school to work in a Garment District factory. But in 1904 he bought a penny arcade and then built up a chain of theaters in the New York City area. He formed the Box Office Attraction Company in 1912 to produce his own movies, less out of creative ambition than to expand in business and have more product to play. So he was making pictures, distributing and exhibiting them, and in 1915 he started the Fox Film Corporation. By the late 1920s he owned extravagant theaters (such as the Roxy in New York, with 6,200 seats, for which he paid $15 million). He made successful films with stars such as Theda Bara, William Farnum, and Tom Mix and was trying to take over a controlling interest in the Loews releasing company.

He might have managed it, but for the effects of the 1929 Wall Street crash, which coincided with a disabling automobile accident. So many movie tycoons fell as fast as they rose. Fox was forced to sell off his own company. Litigation ensued, and he became bankrupt. He went to prison for six months in the early 1940s for trying to bribe a judge, and he died in 1952.

F. W. Murnau was a classier fellow. Born in Bielefeld, in Germany, in 1888 (given name Plumpe), he attended the University of Heidelberg (art and literature) before joining the Max Reinhardt company in Berlin as an actor and an assistant. He had been a pilot during the war—he was a tall, handsome redhead, with a deep tan—and he was gay. He began directing in 1919 and is famous now for the first notable Dracula picture,
Nosferatu
(1922), though that film did not open in America, for legal reasons. His great coup was
The Last Laugh
, or
Der Letzte Mann
(1924), a studied portrait of the humiliation of a pompous hotel porter who is reduced to being a lavatory attendant. That man was played by Emil Jannings (regarded as the great actor of those days), and the film was remarkable for its moving camera, its use of shadow, its accumulation of atmosphere, and its determination to live without intertitles wherever possible. It is also so labored as to be both sentimental and calculated, but in the America otherwise pledged to action, pace, and happiness on-screen, this portrait in sinking melancholy was received with extra respect. So William Fox resolved to get Murnau to America.

It's worth asking why Murnau accepted. He was doing very well at the Ufa studio (Universum Film AG) in Germany. He had his corps of craftsmen there, and an audience ready for his taste in material. He was living in a society more accepting of his lifestyle. But he believed the American studios were better equipped than those in Germany, and he was aroused by the thought of more money, creative freedom, and the universal audience American movies were reaching. All through the years, or until recently, most filmmakers have longed to come to America. Another reason for that, with Murnau and so many, was the naïve idealism that thought the world might be saved if one had a strong enough center of distribution, a lighthouse for the light: “The screen has as great a potential power as any other medium of expression. Already it is changing the habits of mankind, making people who live in different countries and speak different languages, neighbors. It may put an end to war, for men do not fight when they understand each other's heart.”

In Germany, Murnau had been a studio director, filming in artificial light. But he was thrilled by America. “There is a tremendous energy. The whole tradition suggests speed, fastness, rhythms of nature. Everything is new. Nature has given her a vast and beautiful landscape. A marvelous variety of vegetation, a blue sea and all this within a hundred mile radius of Hollywood.”

For his part, Fox sought class and novelty, a continental gravity to offset any fear that American pictures remained crass, industrialized and trashy, and lagging behind the other arts. Fox would have been horrified to think he was seeking something Germanic—it was so important to him to be American. Yet he wanted something “infinitely cultured.” Throughout the 1920s, Hollywood had experimented with European talents, such as Lubitsch, von Stroheim, Victor Sjöström, Garbo, and Pola Negri. And the results were often tragicomic.

Von Stroheim's attempt to make a piece of extended European naturalism from an American classic—
Greed
, based on Frank Norris's scathing novel
McTeague
—had led to a film so long and downbeat that Irving Thalberg, the production controller at M-G-M, had taken it away from the director and cut it down from eight hours to two. Stroheim was a true director, a visionary, and a pioneer in psychological realism, plus a nightmare to the system and a liability to himself, bound to be wronged. His attraction to sadomasochism and excessive detail alarmed his employers. It was predictable he was going to fail—but then he pioneered the place of grand failure in American films in delivering a raped masterpiece that still commands attention. But his fate made it clear that America was not really a safe haven for “Germanic genius.”

Murnau's deal gave him everything he could think of asking for (including $125,000 for the first year). The script and the subject of the film were under his control. He was able to bring along coworkers from Germany, and he was indulged mightily in the most important element: the sets, or what we now call production design. The scale of the sets compelled Fox to buy new premises (in Westwood). No film of that era had an open budget, but Murnau does not seem to have been restricted. Some estimates are that $200,000 was spent on the elaborate sets—a huge sum for those days. Above all, Fox made a public fuss of Murnau, and offered up Janet Gaynor and George O'Brien, both robustly American, to play German peasants.

Fox must have approved the German story line (even if he couldn't imagine what it would look like yet). His wife was his sturdy script adviser. Indeed, the script for
Sunrise: The Song of Two Humans
had actually been written in Germany before Murnau set out, by Carl Mayer, his regular scenarist. People said it read like a poem. It was taken from Hermann Sudermann's story “The Trip to Tilsit” (published in 1917), the tale of a young married couple living happily in the countryside until the husband is attracted to the maid. As they undertake their trip, the wife suspects the husband means to kill her.

But Mayer and Murnau changed it for the screen: in
Sunrise
, the married couple have a baby, and the maid is replaced by a City Woman, a type of vamp: dark-haired, flashily dressed, seen in her underwear once, and smoking cigarettes—Pauline Kael said she had “a dirty smile.” Infatuated with her, the husband thinks to drown his wife. But the wife has no inkling of this plan until their boat trip and the menace in his attitude. The man wavers, and a heavy remorse strikes him. (Remorse is a recurring emotion in silent cinema, as if the system felt guilty over its liberation of fantasy.)

The couple's day in the city turns into a gradual reaffirmation of their love. But as they head home at night a storm comes over the lake and the wife is swept away. The husband believes she has drowned. He is racked with guilt. The suspense is tied in to moral dismay. But the wife is saved, and the love story ends in rapture and reunion, with the vamp slinking back to the city while rural serenity resumes without our having any memory that the husband had murder in his eyes or his large hands.

It was a keynote of
Sunrise
that Fox allowed Murnau to enlist his own people: not just Carl Mayer, but also art director Rochus Gliese (who had served on three of Murnau's German films) and cameraman Charles Rosher. Rosher was English and experienced in Hollywood (he had worked on several Mary Pickford vehicles), but he had met Murnau on a year-long visit to Ufa and had assisted him on his film of
Faust
(1926). There were also important German/Austrian assistants such as Herman Bing and Edgar Ulmer. This team supported Murnau and made American observers aware of him as a lofty authoritarian. He used to view the rushes, turn to his crew, and say, “Now we know how
not
to do it!” Janet Gaynor was of special value in softening her director's heart—though Murnau himself had a romantic eye on George O'Brien, who may have been too virile to notice.

Gaynor had had to test for the part and win Murnau's approval (he had wanted Lois Moran at first), and she was amused by the way he acted so “German”: “He had a German assistant director and I was told by people who could understand German that he was very cruel to him in his language, but he was absolutely marvelous to me. I adored him. I think he was a brilliant director. He was a hard task master, but you were willing to do what he said because you knew he appreciated it.”

One of the things she noticed in Murnau sounds very simple, but it is vital. Directors had told players what to do, where to move, how to gesture—how to convey the plot. Murnau guided them in what they were thinking. He was known for “camera angles,” but Griffith had realized a camera cannot exist without an angle—and oblique angles, done so the character does not seem aware of being watched, allow a sense of insight. “They say I have a passion for ‘camera angles,'” said Murnau. “But I do not take trick scenes from unusual positions just to get startling effects. To me the camera represents the eye of a person, through whose mind one is watching the events on the screen…These angles help to photograph thought.”

Using Germanic literary material, this team made a world for their story that is a giddy mixture of Ufa and California. For the lake and the country scenes, they went to Lake Arrowhead (to the east of Los Angeles, in the mountains) and built a German village that might be made of gingerbread, with pointed, expressionist gables. If that felt odd, they justified the décor by turning the brunette Janet Gaynor into a blond, braided Gretchen figure, straight from German folklore.

There were many night scenes (done back at the studio), where an early and lustrous version of noir was achieved. The husband goes to meet the City Woman in a marsh, with the moon hanging in the night sky like a scaffold. The marsh is a set with an atmospheric richness and botanical detail not attempted in America before. This sequence involved beautiful, searching tracking shots (done from overhead tracks), with the husband made more sinister by having twenty-pound weights in his shoes. O'Brien was urged to act with his back, for he is often seen as a hulk crouched in menace or guilt. Meanwhile, the vamp waits at the edge of glossy water, in her city clothes. The marsh is a state of mind; the lighting is mannered, moody, and strictly controlled. You feel you are there, hesitant and anxious to see what will happen—whereas with so many American silent films, we are witnessing a tableau, a staged event, limited to a single emotional attitude. It is the difference between feeling you are at the theater and inhabiting the lifelike illusion of the movies.

In one of the most striking moments, the City Woman and the man talk of visiting the city. It appears, like a glowing mirage on the horizon, and we see the backs of the two lovers as they watch and imagine they are there, just like members of the audience. It may be one of the first images within a film that says,
this
, this is what the movies are about, watching and dreaming.

As befits a dream, that mood is nocturnal. But by day, the lake and the village are awash with American sunlight, which Rosher films with great tenderness. This is where you feel Murnau's delight in America. Then it is comic and charming that what should snake out of the deep pine forest is a trolley car on tracks. This is how the husband and wife go to the city after he has revealed his murderous instinct to her in their fragile rowboat. But as the two of them sit hunched in shock and silence on the trolley, Murnau creates a magnificent tracking shot (a full mile of tracks was required—people said he had “unchained” the camera) in which, through the windows, we see the country turning into the city. Then we are there, in the unnamed and archetypal city (less Tilsit than Broadway, though Gliese and Murnau wanted a “universal city”). This is another masterpiece of art direction, with models, painted glass, tricked perspectives (and even dwarves to match them), and the feeling that it is a wondrous thing to put a place—its space and its atmosphere—on film.

Nothing as rich as this had been done before in American film. But the backgrounds are subtler than the interaction between the couple. It's as if the world of a film eventually would need to deepen the human behavior. The same can be said for Victor Sjöström's
The Wind
(1928), in which Lillian Gish is a tremulous Virginia girl who moves to West Texas and is tortured by the elements (as well as unkind men). The feeling for place and weather (even without the sound of the wind) is so much more penetrating than the pieties of the story line. Lillian Gish is valiant and artful in
The Wind
, but she is doing too much—as if guessing the story was archaic and restricted. Gish had presented the subject to Irving Thalberg and functioned as a kind of producer. The film flopped and helped close Gish's career at M-G-M. Her natural replacement as icon and actress was Garbo, whose persona was so much more modern, inward, and flawed.