The Best Years of Our Lives: 1927

1927 is a film year I’ve found myself especially interested in lately, partly because I’m still in the process of discovering it, and partly because it’s generally a landmark year for films. 1927 is the year that The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded and also the year of The Jazz Singer, the film that made talking pictures the rule rather than the exception. Although studios would continue to produce silent films for a few more years, sound quickly came to dominate and the popularity of the new format sealed the fate of the old one. 1927 was the last great year for silent films and a great year in film full stop, with many enduring classics being produced and released:


Sunrise: My favourite film from 1927 and one of my favourites of all time. F.W. Murnau's graceful masterpiece won a special Oscar as Best Unique and Artistic Production.


Metropolis: Fritz Lang's seminal science fiction film continues to influence films even 70 years after its release. Echoes of Metropolis can be heard in Frankenstein, Blade Runner, and Star Wars amongst others.


It: Over the decades Hollywood has crowned a number of "It Girl"s with varying levels of success, but Clara Bow was the very first, so named for her role in this film. Unfortunately for her she was also one of the many actors who wasn't successful in making the transition from silents to sound.


The General: Buster Keaton was a master and made a number of great films, but I think this one might be his most perfect. Well crafted in every respect, this is a movie that I can watch over and over again.


Wings: The first Best Picture winner is a sweeping World War I epic that has it all: action, romance, tragedy, and a star making appearance by Gary Cooper in a small role.


Napoleon: Abel Gance's staggering epic about the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Employed some technical innovations, particularly in its use of handheld cameras.


October: An epic about the 1917 October Revolution, this film by Sergei Eisenstein had the unenviable task of following up his masterpiece Battleship Potemkin.

As if all that wasn't enough, 1927 is also the year in which the great Barbara Stanwyck made her film debut in Broadway Nights.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

Director: F.W. Murnau
Starring: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston

To call Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans simply a film is to do it an injustice. This is poetry in motion, a graceful and haunting gift to anyone who loves the art of filmmaking. Even today, with technology so far advanced from what F.W. Murnau had to work with, it is rare to see a film that moves so fluidly and with such ease. This beautiful, atmospheric film is a must-see for any movie lover.

The plot of the film is straight forward. The characters are the Man (George O’Brien) and his Wife (Janet Gaynor, who won the first Academy Award for Best Actress for this film), and a Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston). The story takes place in the countryside where the Man is a farmer and has fallen under the spell of the Woman, who wants him to kill the Wife so that they can run off together. “Spell” is the only way to accurately describe their relationship. The film begins with the Woman creeping near the couple’s home and whistling to the Man. He stands as if in a trance and follows her out to the woods. The scene that follows him through the woods to his meeting with the Woman is breathtakingly beautiful, one of many examples in the film of Murnau freeing the story from the conventions of contemporaneous filmmaking and letting it move. The Woman plants her idea in the Man’s head. He’s horrified at first but quickly acquiesces. He will kill the Wife so that he and the Woman can be together. He takes the Wife on a boat ride (another beautifully shot scene) and attempts to kill her but can’t bring himself to do it. She flees and he chases her, trying to convince her that it was all a mistake. They spend time together in the city and fall in love once again. This sequence is the most charming of the film, alternating between romance and comedy. Happy once again, they return to the country where tragedy strikes – the circumstances and resolution, I won’t reveal.

This is a very simple story, but it’s the way that the story is presented to us that makes this film brilliant. Murnau creates a mood here, not only through the seeming weightlessness of his camera and the tone set by the cinematography, but also through the inter-titles which, though spare, contribute a great deal to the style of the film. When The Woman suggests that the Man kill his Wife, it isn’t shown to us with a flat title, but rather she suggests that he drown his wife and the words run down the screen like water. Murnau also seems to use all the technology at his disposal in order to let the film glide from one moment to another. In one sequence the Man and the Wife are crossing the street, the shot dissolves to them walking through a woodland and then dissolves back to the street where the Man and Wife are kissing and bringing traffic to a stop. The ways that Murnau finds to engage us in the world on screen and convey the changing relationships of the film are wonderfully innovative from both a technical and an artistic standpoint.

I know people who shun silent films like the plague because they’ve convinced themselves that these films will be hard to follow (I usually find that these same people claim that films shot in black and white make things on screen more difficult to distinguish, a notion I find ridiculous), but that idea really couldn’t be further from the truth. This is a film that is better for not having dialogue because to have the characters speak to each other would spoil the dreamlike quality of the way the narrative unfolds. The dialogue would perhaps ring false, too sentimental, and therefore drag the film down; but freed from dialogue, the film is able to soar above what words would convey and present the emotions at play – desire, jealousy, love, fear, remorse – with an urgency and intensity that remains undiluted. There are many films that are great but flawed. Sunrise is a film that is perfect. A truly unqualified masterpiece.