Nov. 04, 2002 - 5:23 pm
maybe i shouldn't have watched this one when i was so utterly tired yesterday afternoon. anyway, i was trying to watch as many of these as i could before i have to return them to the library. this is a classic film by the great German director F. W. Murnau of Nosferatu (1922) fame. this film actually won Best Picture for 1927 as well. to clarify here, there were actually 2 Best Picture winners at the 1929 ceremony. Wings (1927) won Best Picture, Production and Sunrise won Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production. for some reason though, Wings is always referred to as the only Best Picture winner for 1929 though. whatever. i've for sure seen them all now though.
this silent movie doesn't have an extraordinarily thick plot. basically there's a man with a farm and a wife and a baby. but he also has a mistress from the city who wants him all for herself. she's very evil (which probably means to say that the city connotes evil as well). her plan is to delude him into selling his farm and murdering his wife and then taking possession of him. so of course he falls for it. his plan for murdering his sweet blonde wife is to take her out on a boating trip and push her into the lake, drowning her. after he decides not to at the last minute, they spend the rest of the film renewing their marriage vows and falling in love all over again.
i'm not sure why seemingly no one else has noticed the connection between this film and A Place in the Sun (1951). it's the same thing with the murder plot. complicated brunette entices married man to drown his unsuspecting blonde wife on a misguided boat ride. of course the murder plot is probably a bit more justified in A Place in the Sun seeing how the wife is Shelley Winters and the "mistress" is a young Elizabeth Taylor...back when she was still an attractive woman. if i haven't ever mentioned this before, everyone here needs to go see A Place in the Sun. that movie is wonderful.
anyway, the thing about Sunrise is it moves amazingly slowly. the shots are way too long, and the acting style is fairly terrible. i almost fell asleep while watching it and i had to fastforward several scenes so that the people would actually move across the screen as opposed to creeping around when it really wasn't necessary.
you probably shouldn't watch this unless you really want to see the beautiful shot of the sunrise behind the couple near the beginning. it's the same one we see Brad Pitt watching at the theater in Interview with the Vampire (1994).