Naturally
City Girl (1930)
directed by F. W. Murnau
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Sunrise is mentioned many places, and rightly so. The press I like the least involves Terrence Malick, who made his career on the comparison. Days of Heaven, it turns out, is a dull approximation of City Girl, not Sunrise. I'm proud that my opinion about Malick has changed over the years, and I'll try not to talk about him anymore.
Better to talk about City Girl. A boy named Lem leaves Minnesota to sell his father's wheat in the city. He meets a waitress named Kate at a counter-type restaurant; she dreams of the country, marries him, and follows him home. Lem's father is a hard man, unkind to Kate, and Kate is brokenhearted that Lem won't stand up for her. She thought she'd found a "real two-fisted guy to take care of me," she says, but she was wrong.
There are wrinkles, and a storm. The wheat must be cut in advance of it, and a cartful of harvesters fall in love with Lem's unhappy new wife. One veers from happy-go-lucky to truly menacing in the face of a full moon, but the rest comb their hair and lounge about while one tries for the title of Mr. Kurt Rusell of 1930.
I'm not doing it justice. "What's the matter with you hicks?" asks Kate. "Don't people ever fall in love out here?" She is the strongest woman I remember from almost any film, carefree at her happiest, and striking in her fury. Real-life fields of Oregon wheat move like the sea, but the fence that Kate walks beside is standard-issue studio sized, stretched to the far horizon of night only by Ernest Palmer's cinematography and by Mary Duncan herself. "Happiness must be earned," said the desert djinn, and a world away, beneath the same stars, stands Kate.
directed by F. W. Murnau
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
Sunrise is mentioned many places, and rightly so. The press I like the least involves Terrence Malick, who made his career on the comparison. Days of Heaven, it turns out, is a dull approximation of City Girl, not Sunrise. I'm proud that my opinion about Malick has changed over the years, and I'll try not to talk about him anymore.
Better to talk about City Girl. A boy named Lem leaves Minnesota to sell his father's wheat in the city. He meets a waitress named Kate at a counter-type restaurant; she dreams of the country, marries him, and follows him home. Lem's father is a hard man, unkind to Kate, and Kate is brokenhearted that Lem won't stand up for her. She thought she'd found a "real two-fisted guy to take care of me," she says, but she was wrong.
There are wrinkles, and a storm. The wheat must be cut in advance of it, and a cartful of harvesters fall in love with Lem's unhappy new wife. One veers from happy-go-lucky to truly menacing in the face of a full moon, but the rest comb their hair and lounge about while one tries for the title of Mr. Kurt Rusell of 1930.
I'm not doing it justice. "What's the matter with you hicks?" asks Kate. "Don't people ever fall in love out here?" She is the strongest woman I remember from almost any film, carefree at her happiest, and striking in her fury. Real-life fields of Oregon wheat move like the sea, but the fence that Kate walks beside is standard-issue studio sized, stretched to the far horizon of night only by Ernest Palmer's cinematography and by Mary Duncan herself. "Happiness must be earned," said the desert djinn, and a world away, beneath the same stars, stands Kate.
posted by NPK at 11:10 AM
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