Truncated, reshot and tossed off as part-talkie before its 1970 unearthing, the closer to F.W. Murnau’s Hollywood sojourn is both companion piece to and reconsideration of Sunrise, the director’s (and, thus, cinema’s) culminating achievement -- it is a less obviously sublime achievement, yet in some aspects a more complex one. Painted in less Manichaean tones, the earlier film’s Madonna/whore halves get combined within the title heroine (May Duncan) not as either-or absolutes, but as invaluably mysterious human forces. The sweltering Chicago where waitress Duncan first meets country boy Charles Farrell swarms with people on the go yet is fraught with loneliness, a studio evocation of urban dislocation never more lovingly etched than in the girl’s tiny flat, equipped with glowing neon signs, tram rattling outside and, inevitably, postcards yearning for a bucolic paradise. Her dreams of pastoral sanctuary dissipate, however, as soon the freshly married twosome arrives at Farrell’s Minnesota farm, their honeymoon promptly crushed by the unsmiling suspicions of the lad’s severe Pa (David Torrence). Originally envisioned as a "symphony of wheat," the elemental dimension remains strong in the narrative, celebrated in documentary-style harvesting shots and, unforgettably, through a magical tracking shot jubilantly following the elated couple’s dash through the fields. Yet its idealized country purity is continually questioned not simply by the surging harshness of Nature, or by the latest incarnation of the threatening forces always bearing down on Murnau’s couples (personalized, as in the director’s final masterpiece Tabu, by an oppressive patriarchy), but also by the characters’ own emotions. It is only fitting that Murnau parallels Farrell and Duncan’s struggle to reconnect their love for each other with the climactic race, filmed with splendid oil-lamp chiaroscuro, to rescue the harvest from an incoming hailstorm -- less ensured than at the end of Sunrise, the couple’s tentative happiness acknowledges the unknowability of relationships as an extension of the attempts to harmonize the polarized elements (city and country, man and woman, the corporeal and the spiritual) of the universe around them, and of Murnau’s art in particular. With Edith Yorke, Richard Alexander, Anne Shirley, and Guinn Williams. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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