F.W. Murnau had great success in Germany but it was The Last Laugh with Emil Jannings, made in 1924 and shown in America in 1925, that made Murnau a name in Hollywood. The Last Laugh, with no inter-title dialogue and inventive camera work and set design, wowed everyone who saw it and suddenly, Murnau became the most in-demand director in the film industry. William Fox, head of his own Fox Studios, got to him first.

Fox brought Murnau to America with the intention of having him make an expressionist film like the kind he made in Germany. Murnau himself wasn't about to argue. He wrote in 1928, "I accepted the offer from Hollywood because I think one can always learn and because America gives me new opportunities to develop my artistic claims."

For Murnau's first American movie, the director turned to Hermann Sudermann's Lithuanian Stories and with his writer from The Last Laugh, Carl Mayer, chose the story The Journey to Tilsit. The story concerns a peasant named Ansass and his wife, Indre. The two have a happy marriage until Ansass is smitten with a young servant girl who, wanting to be with Ansass, plots to kill his wife by drowning her. Ansass and Indre travel across the river to Tilsit and while there, renew their love for each other. Upon returning across the river (when Ansass had planned to murder Indre), the currents of the river overturn their boat. Ansass dies but Indre lives.

Mayer and Murnau took this basic framework and created the more expressionistic, symbolic Sunrise. By making the peasant girl a seductress from the city and making the rural area where the man and wife lived a hotspot for urban vacationers, Mayer and Murnau were able to form a full circle of give and take that makes the story of Sunrise so complex while remaining simple on the surface. The countryside attracts the woman from the city who falls for the country man. In turn, she wants to take him back to the city where she is in her element and out of the prying eyes of the villagers. The city initially means danger, seduction and sin but, in fact, once the man and wife actually go to the city, their love is renewed by the vitality of the city and all that it has to offer. Sunrise does not condemn one lifestyle over the other but rather, sees them both working together to mold the characters' ideals.

Finally, both Mayer and Murnau agreed that the ending of Sunrise should be different. They wanted the movie not to end with tragedy but with moral resolution. The vamp would return to the city and the man and woman would return to their home, alive and together as the sun rises. In this way, they felt, the countryside and the cityscape would take back their own. The world would once again be in balance and that balance, in the end, would be the resolution.

by Greg Ferrara