City Girl (1930)
Directed by F.W. Murnau

Film Review

City Girl is the third of four films that the legendary German-born filmmaker Friedrich Murnau made in Hollywood before his tragic death in a car accident 1931. It has many striking similarities with his earlier film Sunrise (1927), which is considered to be Murnau's masterpiece.  Both films make wry contrasts between urban and rural life (at a time when the former was rapidly superseding the latter) and both have as their basis an idyllic love affair that comes close to being destroyed by human frailty. 

Whilst Sunrise and City Girl have many thematic and plot similarities, from the point of view of visual style they could hardly be more different.  Compared with the haunting dreamlike poetry of Sunrise, which bears the imprint of Murnau's earlier expressionist phase, City Girl has a pared back, almost austere naturalism that at times makes it indistinguishable from documentary, particularly in its second half.   Moreover, the location sequences, where endless fields of wheat stretch to the horizon, evoke a style of cinema that is uniquely American.   The way in which the landscape ceases to be a mere backdrop but becomes an essential character in the narrative is redolent of American cinema from the 1930s.  In this way, City Girl presages the work of such great American filmmakers as John Ford and even evokes that mainstay of American cinema, the western.

Another thing that sets City Girl apart from many of Murnau's other films is that the characters are better developed and played more convincingly.  The playful humour in the first half of the film and the heart-rending poignancy in the second half are more keenly felt because the characters have depth and charm, and are not merely the comedy caricatures that we find in some of Murnau's earlier films.   The star of the film is Charles Farrell, who was at the time one of Fox's leading actors.  Farrell is best remembered for the half a dozen films he made with director Frank Borzage, including The River (1929), in which he starred with Mary Duncan, the heroine of City Girl.

The production of City Girl was upset by frequent disagreements between Murnau and his producer William Fox.  In the end, Fox took the film away from its director and charged his assistant, A.F. Erickson, with the task of completing it.  This has led to considerable speculation as to how the end result may have differed from Murnau's concept.  What is known is that Murnau's original title for the film was Our Daily Bread and that the director intended that the film would be a celebration of wheat, one of the pillars on which the American dream was founded.   The apparent narrative and stylistic cohesion of City Girl would suggest that the film may not be too different from what Murnau had intended.

The initial release of City Girl coincided with the introduction of sound recording and consequently two versions of the film were released - one silent, the other with some added sound elements.  Both versions were lost and it was not until 1961 that a print of the film was unearthed, enabling the silent version to be restored and made available in the early 1970s.  Although it is one of the least known of Murnau's surviving films, City Girl is unquestionably the work of a master filmmaker, a work of great humanity, charm and technical brilliance.

Film Synopsis

Tustine, a patriarchal Minnesota farmer, sends his son Lem to town to get the best price he can for the year's wheat crop.  When he reaches the crop exchange, Lem is panicked by the rapid decline in prices and sells at a loss.  Before he heads back home, he meets a waitress, Kate, in a diner and instantly falls in love with her.  Kate is equally taken with Lem, partly because she has romantic notions about life in the country.  They marry and head back to Lem's farm, where they receive a far from warm welcome from the older Tustine...