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The hallucinatory first view of the amusement park like Sunrise's swirling dream city is but one of Frank Borzage's various points of contact with Murnau, naturally the Germanic element is not lost on Lang's own subsequent version. Barker (Charles Farrell) and servant (Rose Hobart) aboard the carousel as their flirtation spins, "sinful, but awfully thrilling." (The afterglow is savored at the pavilion, feasting on a mug of beer and hammered dulcimer and the maiden's peepers in diaphanous close-up.) Domesticity is a drab home with a view of the roller-coaster flashing in the distance, the loafing brute fancies himself an artist but his shady pal (Lee Tracy) has other plans. "Art's a great fella, but he doesn't pay." The heart palpitates behind the hidden knife, the candle burns after the botched robbery, the celestial locomotive bursts through. Uncanny spaces for sparrows and wolves and buzzards to play in, with train tracks extending to the edge of the world. "Well, what about the next world?" Above the clouds, a scoundrel's judgment before the Chief Magistrate (H.B. Warner) as windows turn into flickering mini-screens four decades ahead of Bertolucci's Il Conformista. Love rapturous and dolorous and physical and metaphysical, Borzage's expressionism embraces all its sides. Down to Hell on the Red Express ("No political significance"), a second chance ten years later trumpeted by Gabriel's rusty horn, a man's brutal realization that he's better off as memory than presence. "It's touching. It's mysterious." The closing vision reappears in Peter Ibbetson and Cabin in the Sky. With Estelle Taylor, Walter Abel, Mildred Van Dorn, Guinn Williams, Lillian Elliott, Anne Shirley, and Bert Roach. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |