The Big Screen (6 page)

So the cinematic facility and the beauty in
Sunrise
keep bumping up against the film's daft situation. We relish the night in the marsh, feeling its seductiveness and its danger, but what should we make of the film's city? In an open boat on the lake, the wife has had every indication that her husband wants to remove her. Yet Mayer's script and Murnau's film ask us to believe that a day in the city (or half an hour in the movie) restores their love and trust.

The city scenes are enjoyable, but they are the part of the film where Murnau may have yielded to studio pressures. There is a “Comedy Consultant” in the credits, and there are scenes—at the barber shop, the photographic studio, the wedding they happen to observe, and the pig-catching adventure—that seem to come out of a standard American movie. So be it. Those scenes play well enough. But they contribute to the notion of the city as an expansive, amiable, and fun place, as friendly as it is lively. Nothing in this city is foreboding or indicative of real urban problems. Nothing suggests the vamp lives there, or that the city has made her. So it's hard to ignore this question: Should the couple who have come close to falling out of love in the country move to the city to have a more fulfilling life?

Moreover, can the husband be relied on? Throughout the picture, O'Brien's oppressive presence (his thinking) signals his violence as much as that hunched posture and the lead-footed walk. Murnau is teaching us that it can matter less in a movie what a person says than what he is. So the husband “sees the light” of sunrise, but we can't forget his ingrained hostility, the natural grasp of a strangler's hands, or the way he takes a knife to threaten a foolish man in the city. George O'Brien's husband needs more than his Gretchen, their plump baby, and the pleasures of Lake Arrowhead to be made whole. He has no apparent occupation. He is idle and dangerous. What is most penetrating in
Sunrise
is leading it past the guidelines of a prim scenario. The film says “come to the city” and “stay in love” at a time when Hollywood was in confusion over both the town/country split in America and the condition of marriage.

Around 1920, the balance of U.S. population first moved in favor of “urban” over country. Remembering that the population at the moment of independence was about 95 percent rural and 5 percent urban, in 1920 the balance was 49 percent rural and 51 percent urban. (It is by now three-quarters urban and a quarter rural.) As a mass medium, Hollywood was deeply concerned about that shift. It was in the business of building great urban theaters (such as the Roxy, which opened in 1927), but it had to retain the rural audience, and honor its conservatism and adhering religious attitudes. At key moments in
Sunrise
, a church bell tolls as a sign of moral surveillance. This soundtrack, with music by Hugo Riesenfeld, was not synchronized at first, but played separately on Fox's Movietone system.

Janet Gaynor's wife is as vague and bright as a Madonna, and the film is loaded with disdain for the City Woman. But it can't take its eyes off her either. As played by Margaret Livingstone, she is vivacious, quick, up-to-date, and…here's the word: sexy. Why not? Isn't this a movie, and isn't looking at pretty women (from the safe dark) a terrific kick in moviegoing? That's what distinguishes Louise Brooks in
Pandora's Box
, and it is likely that her director, G. W. Pabst, had seen
Sunrise
. Yet silent cinema was often shy of admitting its own voyeurism. We regard Lillian Gish as a hallowed figure, but was she ever sexy, or just the figurehead of an archaic notion of virtue? Cecil B. DeMille, who became a success just as Griffith faded away, was greedy, and horny for Gloria Swanson as the new woman. The scene in
Sunrise
where the City Woman walks into plain view, without coyness or embarrassment, in her black underwear is a gift that says, didn't you want to see this?

No character in
Sunrise
mentions divorce, but the public was already trying it. In 1900 in the United States the divorce rate was 84 per 100,000 men, and 114 for women. By the early 1930s, the figures were 489 and 572. (By 2000 they were 9,255 and 12,305.) No one would say the movies did that alone: the impact of the Depression and the wars played a part, and the overall liberation of behavior from stale rules was getting ready for feminism and gay marriage, to say nothing of divorce.

Moviemakers were well aware of the surge in divorce—but anxious not to be blamed for it. Still, the movies were a sensational public spectacle where audiences were encouraged to gaze at good-looking people (different ones every week) and dream of their chances.
Sunrise
is hailed now for its modernity, leading the medium into art, but it is a very old-fashioned film, harking back to the purity and deserving romantic aspirations of the young wife. Janet Gaynor is not that far removed from Lillian Gish in a film that never dares ask itself, perhaps she's dull? (How could someone so good be dull? That is a dangerous question for every young woman.)

Well before
Sunrise
, Cecil B. DeMille did a series of films with “daring” titles—
Don't Change Your Husband
(1919) and
Why Change Your Wife?
(1920)—that flirted with the possibility of divorce. As a rule, those films settled eventually for the marital status, but not before Gloria Swanson, their star, had time for amorous experiments and taking a bath. DeMille liberated the bathroom as a locale, with hot water, steam, perfume, and undress as its extras. This was an era when the sale of cosmetics for women rose rapidly. “Max Factor” (real name Maksymilian Faktorowicz) came to America from Poland, and later he moved to Los Angeles. He brought a gold called makeup. That new room in the culture, the bathroom, became a site of dreaming, a dressing room in the slow shift where so many of us became performers. In his excellent life of DeMille, Scott Eyman tells the story of C.B. urging Swanson on in a bath scene: “Prolong it! Relish the smell of the rosewater. More rapture.”

The director's note to an actress coincides with the audience's feeling about the promise of movies. So some spectators wanted nicer bathrooms, false eyelashes, pretty clothes in the latest styles, as well as more adventure in life. Swanson would say that “Working for Mr. DeMille was like playing house in the world's most expensive department store.” Movies had an unstoppable affinity with shopping, and it showed in the credits for wardrobe or costume, facilities that many women had not guessed they might possess, or deserve. In 1924, Edward Steichen took a famous photograph of Swanson staring through a veil of elaborately decorated black lace. It could be the poster for the era.

As late as the early 1950s, in America and Britain, many middle-class women made their own clothes on Singer sewing machines from paper patterns. In the early years of feature filmmaking, most people bought clothes out of necessity, not for pleasure or self-expression. One revolution in films of the 1920s was not just looking at women, but also delighting in what they were wearing, or half-wearing. So pretty women became prettier in expensive and fanciful clothing, often made out of light-catching fabrics such as charmeuse, satin, and silk. Such clothes were beyond the budget of ordinary audiences, but movies cheerfully celebrated wealth and style, and brought them within a more common range.
Pretty Woman
lifts off as a dream when the Julia Roberts character goes to Rodeo Drive to shop for a transforming wardrobe.

Many movies of the 1920s had increasingly slim stars in very fashionable clothes. Designers were hired in, and sometimes they were only a step away from stores and lines of clothing. What was the romance of movies but the thought of changing your life? The most important thing about Louise Brooks in America in the 1920s was not her acting, or
Pandora's Box
; it was her haircut. The Oscar for costume was not introduced until 1948, but the art, the cult, and the business consequences had been current for decades.

Travis Banton (from Waco, Texas) got a start doing Mary Pickford's wedding dress when she married Douglas Fairbanks in 1920. Then, from 1924 to 1938, he was in charge of clothes at Paramount, where he did the von Sternberg–Dietrich films, among hundreds of others. Edith Head, his assistant, would win eight Oscars for costume, and was essential to the looks of Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. More recently, we have had Milena Canonero (
Barry Lyndon, Out of Africa, Damage
) and Sandy Powell (
Shakespeare in Love
,
The Aviator
,
Hugo
). And it's not just clothes for women: Giorgio Armani dressed Richard Gere in Paul Schrader's
American Gigolo
(1980), a landmark in the right to be stylish. Perhaps it was an old habit coming back: so many of the first moguls had begun in the clothing business.

Some observers were nervous about the glamorizing of clothes and bathrooms, and feared it could lead to libertinism and consumerism! For a moment there was a worry that foreigners (Jews maybe?) and upstarts were corrupting the respectable codes of behavior in the greatest and most moral country on earth. It passed. If you show people a half-dressed wonder when the person inspected seems unaware of being seen, and flaunting it, then the audience become voyeurs, floating on the dream that they might go further. “More rapture.” It is the promise in the shining light, and it means a yearning for “stuff,” clothes, and wanting to look like him or her, or both of them, that won't stop. Most movies ever made have been inadvertent commercials for the stuff.

Sexual suggestiveness was an elixir, but a hazard, too. In the year 1928, for instance, out of nearly 3,000 cuts made in new films as censorship, 509 were because of “Sex—Suggestive.” The only topic that needed scissors more was “Display of Dangerous Weapons”: 528.
Sunrise
has no guns, and guns were glorified by movies from the very start. (At the end of
The Great Train Robbery
, 1903, in a mood of defiance and bravado, a cowboy fires his six-shooter straight into the camera.) But
Sunrise
is tense with thoughts of murder and so it bears out another engine in movies—that of destruction and disorder, culminating in killing. In a hundred years, the movies have dissolved so much of our resistance to murder. That homicidal weight in the husband is never examined or questioned. He isn't expected to see a shrink! The menace is there, and implicitly it's just another aspect of restless manliness.

Sunrise
had its premiere in New York in September 1927, only a few weeks before the opening of Al Jolson in
The Jazz Singer
, the first significant talking picture, the addition that could have made
Sunrise
more dangerous, or immediate. Not that the film lacked admirers. The
New York Times
called it “a brilliant achievement,” and in
Life
, Robert Sherwood (soon to be a playwright and screenwriter) said it was “the most important picture in the history of the movies.” It played twenty-eight weeks in New York and ten weeks in Los Angeles, but it was not popular in the rural provinces. In Los Angeles, Irene Mayer wrote to her then-boyfriend, David O. Selznick, saying it was the picture that anyone young and smart
had
to see. Perhaps she got her father to see it.

Movie people were impressed by
Sunrise
because of its intimations of what films could do: the creation of a credible, living world (the city) and the way in which, in Molly Haskell's words, “Murnau's city often seems like a metaphor for the sound film, trying to burst into the peaceful haven of the country, the silent film.” That's a retrospective insight, and a good one, but not one that occurred to Murnau. A comment closer to the director's gaze, perhaps, is Thomas Elsaesser's observation that in
Sunrise
we face “the open secret of film-making itself, intensely eroticizing the very act of looking, but also every object looked at by a camera.” The sheen in
Sunrise
is the glow of desirability. It affects all three of the leading characters, but it is an illumination that hangs over the world. It is incandescence. People felt they had seen insight, and once glimpsed, that is nothing you ever want to lose.

But that is not all of the
Sunrise
story. What we see as erotic could be read as respectability in 1927, and respectability was as important a goal in pictures as money. The American movie business was an avalanche in the 1920s, the prime age of motion pictures. Going to the movies and thinking about them became a regular part of popular culture. But that only provoked an envious reaction in those other strongholds that believed they directed the national culture: the churches; academia; Washington, D.C.; the high arts.

If you want an example of that disdain, go to “The Cinema,” a superior yet discerning essay written by Virginia Woolf in 1926, a year after the publication of
Mrs. Dalloway
, a novel that seems richly affected by film—not just in visibility, its present tense, and its unwitting but contingent circles of action, but also in the immediacy of feeling we are “there.” In fact, in 1925 there were few screen moments as rich as
Mrs. Dalloway
could be—and Mrs. Woolf was enough of a filmgoer to be in no doubt about that.