City Girl

City Girl – F. W. Murnau’s 1930 City Girl generally disappoints the film maker’s admirers. Working in Germany in the twenties, Murnau’s used dense, Rembrandt-influenced chiaroscuro in films like Faust; his moving camera is legendary – The Last Laugh exemplifies this aspect of his genius. Sunrise, made in Hollywood in the late twenties, is often cited as the most beautiful film ever produced – this picture combines Murnau’s penchant for long tracking shots with his dense orchestration of light as a Raumgestaltenden Faktor (space-forming element). Nosferatu, of course, virtually invents the vampire genre. By contrast, City Girl is exceptionally unassuming. The movie starts as a light comedy – a country bumpkin travels to Chicago to sell his family’s wheat harvest at the Board of Trade and meets a waitress in a café. Impulsively, the two get married. Back on the farm, the young man’s tyrannical father abuses the “city girl” and, even, strikes her for interfering with his family. The girl rejects her husband, and is almost raped by a brutish member of a harvesting crew that is working against time to extract the family’s wheat from the fields in the face of an oncoming storm. After some lurid melodrama, Murnau stages a perfunctory climax – a fistfight in a runaway farm-cart at night in a storm – and there is a happy ending of sorts. The film illustrates Murnau’s ability to work effectively in every possible film genre – there has probably never been a film maker so profusely gifted and versatile. City Girl is an exercise in high clarity precisionist film making – the movie looks like one of Charles Sheeler’s images of industrial plants or grain elevators. There is no soft-focus, none of Murnau’s magisterial lighting effects – the images are hard-edged and rim-lit so that the scenes have a vivid, almost three-dimensional lucidity. The farm on the Minnesota prairie is all right-angles, bare empty rooms, a barn and a gaunt-looking house set in geometric fields that seem to have been sliced from the prairie with a straight razor. Murnau’s lighting is analytical – his night scenes feature clear delineation between zones of the light and dark. Chicago is a shown as masses of people jammed into rectangular spaces, all evenly lit as if by overhead fluorescent lights. Murnau only moves the camera a couple of times, but, then, with great effect – for instance, when the young man learns that the market for wheat is collapsing, the camera tracks suddenly away from him, moving to the left so that he vanishes in a crowd of indifferent people hustling across a busy, if nondescript, intersection. “Nondescript” is an useful way to describe this film. Murnau’s characters are vivid, if stereotypical, and the conflict between father and son – characteristic of German expressionism – is shocking and gripping, but all of the action occurs within a rigid geometry of well-lit and completely nondescript (even flatly inexpressive) settings. A few long-shots show the sweep of what is supposed to be Minnesota prairie – but scenic elements are generally muted, even rejected, by Murnau’s mise-en-scene. This picture reminds us that Nosferatu is most effective when it seems to approach raw documentary, and there are similarly very strong documentary-like elements in City Girl – the wheat harvest scenes in particular have this flavor. I thought this film was continuously interesting and inventive. It seems transitional to me – although Murnau was to die before he completed the transition from hybrids like City Girl to something else.. (His last picture, Tabu, is also a weird and poetic combination of domestic melodrama, horror, and documentary shot in the South Sea Islands with participation of Robert Flaherty, the film maker famous for Nanook of the North.) Murnau, who was homosexual, doesn’t seem much interested in the sexual aspects of the relationship between the farm boy and the City Girl – they are severely chaste and Murnau’s focus is on the hero’s mother, his little sister, the tyrannical patriarch, and, oddly enough, the rowdy, disreputable harvesting crew, rough-necks all sleeping together in the angular attic of the old farm house. Since the love between the hero and girl is indifferently portrayed, there is something a little hollow at the center of the film.