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F.W. Murnau – City Girl (1930)

Posted By: newland

Date: 15 Mar 2009 22:36:49

Lem goes to Chicago to sell the wheat his family has grown on their farm in Minnesota. There he meets the waitress Kate. They fall in love and get married before going back to the farm. Kate is accepted by Lem's mother and kid sister but is rejected by his father, who believes she married for the money.
Long available only in soft 16-millimeter prints, City Girl now possesses a contrast and detail that suggest a pristine 35-millimeter source, and perhaps the dramatically improved image quality will contribute to the rehabilitation of what has long been Murnau’s most underrated film.

Often overlooked because it survives in a version that was edited without Murnau's involvement, City Girl is a breath-taking rediscovery – and deserves to have the asterisk removed from its reputation. It does not include the camera pyrotechnics of Murnau's earlier work. Instead it is a more delicate, low-key drama which, curiously, appears to have been influenced by the Borzage films (which had been inspired by the Murnau films). As a result, it has a depth of feeling and emotional maturity that is often lacking in Murnau's work (where characters feel more like symbols, rather than flesh-and-blood beings). — Asa Kendall Jr., Turner Classic Movies

Murnau is realism + poetry, and slimming down his materials to such a leanness as in City Girl lets his hand water, flower, and blossom every element at his disposal. You have never seen a city diner in American film, felt its heat, its hubbub, its routine, its turnover, its charm, its tedium and its spunk until you have seen City Girl and you see how Farrel casually meets and unconsciously courts Duncan at the diner counter. You have never seen the loneliness of life in the city until you see the light of a passing elevated train sputter across Duncan’s face and her tiny potted plant in her cramped apartment. — Daniel Kasman, theauteurs.com

City Girl is a fairly conventional story of a young man from the country who falls in love with a waitress on his first trip to the city. He marries her and brings her home to a hostile father. But Murnau takes this material and turns it into an expressionist exploration of sexuality, powering it with a theme of "it's not where we live but how we live". Within a world of hostile shadows and menacing crowds real people live and breathe in brilliant naturalistic performances. Farrell and Duncan are amazingly good. And even the smallest part is played with vivid life.
But the real star is Murnau's startling direction. Tracking shots years ahead of their time – watch the scene where the couple run through a field of wheat – extraordinary point of view shots, and remarkable shots of and in fast moving wagons. The frightening city seen in Sunrise is here again - with trains and crowds obscuring vision and soot on the pot plants. And then there is the beauty of the countryside and the harvesting of wheat.
Murnau made what I believe to be the best silent film ever with Sunrise in 1927. With City Girl he comes close to matching it. — David Atfield, IMDb review