F. W. Murnau | City Girl / 1930

the process of turning wheat into bread

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marion Orth and Berthold Viertel (based on the play “The Mud Turtle,” by Elliott Lester), F. W. Murnau (director) City Girl / 1930

 

F. W. Murnau’s important film City Girl is sometimes described as lost since the sound version forced upon the director when new owners took over the Fox Film Studios as he was shooting the film has indeed been lost. But the original silent version was rediscovered and saved from the Fox vaults in 1970 by Eileen Bowser of the Museum of Modern Art.

    Although it would certainly be interesting to have the sound version just for comparison’s sake, one cannot imagine this forgotten gem, originally titled Our Daily Bread—a far more appropriate and poetic appellation—with sound given the powerful silent version that speaks multitudes. Filmmaker Terrence Malick has credited the film with being the primary inspiration for his own poetic film, Days of Heaven (1978). The sound version, in any event, was a terrible flop at the box-office, and by the time the new owners were reediting Murnau’s original for the new medium, Murnau had moved on in frustration to begin his new project Tabu (1931).

     Superficially, there is nothing particularly special about this cinematic work’s simple plot. A young rustic rube, Lem Tustine (Charles Farrell) is sent by his Minnesota wheat-growing farmer father (David Torrence) to Chicago to sell the year’s crop. Lem has been carefully instructed to sell it for a certain amount; indeed, the family’s survival depends on the full amount. But almost immediately upon his arrival the wheat crop drops, while the corn crop rises, and the boy is forced to sell it at a lower price in fear that the markets might take the price even lower.

     Meanwhile, in a large cafeteria he encounters a waitress Kate (Mary Duncan) unhappy with her life in the city in which she slaves through the heat to heckling customers during the day only to return each evening to her tiny flat with a mechanical caged-bird as her only available entertainment. The scenes in her room, as she stares out the window next to the half-made bed are works of art remarkably similar to Edward Hopper’s paintings of lonely women locked away in small rooms of the late 1920s to the early 1930s.

     The moment she spots the open-faced, good looking young farm boy, she’s attracted, just as he is immediately to her. Over the week of his stay, having bought a ticket for meals at the cafeteria, they slowly get to know one another. But finally the day comes when he announces he is leaving on the 1:00 train, and her hopes seem dashed. For a moment, as he insists there’s something he wants to ask her, but is to shy to express it, she breathlessly awaits the question she has been hoping from his lips. He finally pops the question, “Do you like the city?” both disappointed with the impossible and meaningless answer.

     At the train station, he loiters instead of immediately making his way to his train, half hopeful that Kate might show up. Noticing a machine next to him that offers his weight and fortune, the normally penurious young man tosses in a coin where a small placard tells him that if he marries the one he has been thinking of happiness will be found in his life. Convinced that he must return to the cafeteria, he purposely misses his train.

     Meanwhile, Kate has thrown off her apron and rushed to the station, only to be told the train has left. She encounters him again on the street peering into to her workplace, the two joyfully embracing and Lem finally asking her if she might be willing to be a farmer’s wife.

    They marry, sending a telegram back home, Lem’s mother (Edith Yorke) being delighted with the news, while his father becomes immediately convinced that as a waitress the girl is surely only interested in the boy’s money, determining the start to convince his son that he has made a terrible mistake and must send the “city girl” back.

     The married couple arrive, walking the mile or so from the train toward the rather uninviting prairie house, but suddenly in all their youth and momentary joy, choosing to race one another through the wheat fields, Kate waiting to be caught and kissed. It is one of the splendid scenes from the 1930s cinematic imagery, and along with the later dark and foreboding night threshing scenes alone make this movie a near masterpiece.

      Despite their momentary joy and their Kate’s pleasant encounter with Lem’s mother, his sister Marie (Anne Shirley)—for a moment Marie and her cat becoming fascinated over Kate’s mechanical birdcage—all are quickly plunged into immediate fear, anger, and joylessness with the appearance of Lem’s patriarchally-controlling father, who immediately orders Lem to change his clothes for work and confronts Kate, revealing just how he sees her, as he might put it, a “gold-digging harlot.” Standing up for herself to the old man, she insists upon her love and refuses to agree to the father’s vision of her, he slapping her face in retaliation for her resistance.

      When she tells Lem what has happened, he hasn’t the nerve to stand up for her against his father, she realizing that the boy is not only a “mamma’s boy,” but a young man still at his advanced age totally under the thumb of his father’s domination.

      From then on, a battle ensues between the newlyweds, she refusing to allow him to share her bed and he, frustrated and confused, having to face the very next day the jokes of the local farmhands who arrive to help in the threshing of the Tustine farmland. The young bachelors, far less docile than Lem, she his new wife as possible “territory” for conquest as Kate is forced not only to endure their endless leers but the unwanted attentions of Mac (Richard Alexander) who, seizing up the situation immediately, is determined to take Lem’s new wife away from him.

     With innuendos and threatened violence he almost succeeds in convincing Lem’s father that Kate is actually planning to run away with Mac as she nurses a small injury he has received during their night-threshing. Reporting his misperceptions—just as he has from the beginning—to his son brings further tension to the relationship, making Kate’s presence in the house almost impossible.

      Forced to work through the night by a threatened ice storm moving down from Canada, the workers are convinced by Mac to abandon the fields, his method of giving payback to the elder Tustine in order to prove his worth to Kate.

     Escaping through a back window, Kate is determined to leave the unhappy world; but reading the message she has left behind for him, Lem suddenly, as one commentator puts it, “grew the balls” to not only tell his father that he is going after his wife but is leaving with her to make a new home somewhere else; moreover, he wrestles Mac into submission to gain control over the wagon which speeds him to her side. As almost all films of the day required, everything works out in the end. Kate perceives that her husband has become a man, and his father realizes the error of his ways, begging the couple to come back and share their life in “their house.”

      That outline is usually where commentators of this film leave it, suggesting that except for the few set scenes I have already mentioned that the story is hollow of not of great interest, certainly not of the quality of his early German works and Sunrise (1927), the latter of which bears some resemblances with its city / country dichotomy to City Girl.

      But I would argue that almost every image in this film is not only quite memorable but adds force to his investigation of patriarchal rule that is the true subject of the work. If this film is outwardly devoted entirely to heterosexual love, the gay director Murnau knew precisely through his own experience, perhaps, just how such heterodoxy destroyed the lives of the women living the patriarchal control, but their sons and daughters, even if they were also heterosexual. Indeed, Lem might has well be a gay boy whose life is just as restricted for bringing back a wife as it might have been if he brought back a city boyfriend to live with his folks. Both immediately become signs of the Devil’s work, and Lem like any young gay boy is immediately bullied by his peers, in this case the workers who come to the farm to help in the harvest.

      In such a world, sex itself is rendered insignificant, for purposes of procreating only. All sexual joy is restricted, represented in this film by the immediate cessation of their honeymoon romance. Such values infect even the seemingly normal Kate, who because her husband will not represent himself as man enough to stand up to his father, argues that he is equally unworthy of sharing her bed. In fact, she participates in that patriarchal society in that act, forced now, just as Mrs. Tustine and even their daughter to become merely a slave, another kind of hired “worker” who cooks and serves the food, cleans their clothes and house, and faithfully supports all the male pronouncements and behavior. In this male-controlled universe, love is meaningless and sex of minor importance or even a dangerous impediment to the acts necessary for mere survival. Her position on the farm in now just the same as it was working as a waitress in the Chicago cafeteria.

      If the young threshers, particularly Mac might perceive themselves as free from Tustine’s patriarchal rule, not having to live on his farm, they are much mistaken. For they too treat women as objects to be bartered for, their sexuality a momentary pleasure in their longer use as servants and child bearers.

    All of this, obviously, has been said long before and after by feminists throughout history. But Murnau, approaching it primarily through sexual desire and youthful enjoyment, focuses on the important issue that is often overlooked. If one abides with the precepts of such a society he or she must abandonment nearly all pleasures of the flesh and imagination, give up desire and pleasure themselves, whether he or she be heterosexual or homosexual. In fact, had Lem brought home a boyfriend he might have been better treated, having awarded the male-dominated society with another farmer worker needed desperately in Tustine’s manly machine. The workers, if their house loft quarters, in fact, seem to frolic with one another in a manner that is closer to—and permitted— what Lem and Kate momentarily shared just prior to entering this patriarchal backwater.

     The real issue in such a world is not whether a man lays down with another man or a woman but that he even attempts to rest and enjoy himself. The workers are forced out of the beds to fulfill the needs of the land and its crops which rule over them in a manner just as cruel as Tustine’s demands. Pleasure is nearly unknown, and love not even something these people can truly comprehend.

      When Mac questions why someone as beautiful as Kate would have taken up with a weak mamma’s boy such as Lem, Kate summarizes the entire situation in this isolated Minnesota farmland: “What’s the matter with you hicks? Don’t people ever fall in love out here?”

     Mac’s response reiterates what I have suggested is her own unintentional acceptance of male / female heteronormative values, “You didn’t exactly look lovin’ when you run out that room tonight,” referring to the moment when she once again forced her husband out of his bedroom for having believed her father’s insinuations.

       Soon after, Mac resorts to what all men who actually hate the vessels they must use for a moment or two of temporary enjoyment, a near rape of Kate or certainly the suggestion of it. Sex is a demand, a requirement to be fulfilled, not something of mutual joy or pleasure. And in a patriarchal society, men resent the forces that ask them to submit to such pleasures. The joy is transformed into obedience and duty. The only route a young, intelligent woman who finds herself in such a situation is an escape out the window, which Kate takes.

      Lem’s reaction, possible but still improbable, at least puts him back into the picture. But the idea that his father might abandon his assertive control of such a society, even if you had actually killed his son as he believes he has, is highly unlikely and necessary only because of Hollywood demands. Lem’s own sudden action, in fact, might have taken on some meaning had he actually escaped with is wife to a new world, one in which they might define their terms instead of societal tradition. But to return, with wife in hand to his father’s farm with the expectation of a changed world is pure fantasy, which does not really matter to the story since it has made its point through the artful scenario by Marion Orth, a woman brought to Hollywood to work with the phenomenal first US female auteur Lois Weber, who mentored many of the major women working in Hollywood. Her co-writer was Austrian screenwriter Berthold Viertel who worked with Christopher Isherwood on the film Little Friend four years after City Girl, becoming a central figure in Isherwood’s autobiographical fiction Prater Violet.

      But other than early feminists such as Alice Guy Blaché or Lois Weber perhaps, only an openly gay writer such as Murnau, who had been forced to leave just such a world of pre-Hitler Germany, could have so fully recognized the pernicious dangers of such a blatantly patriarchal world. Indeed, all of his films, in one way or another, dealt with heteronormative societies that threatened his films’ heroines and heroes as they attempted to engage in love or pleasure with death. As I write about his very next film: Tabu “…Despite its exotic locale of Bora Bora and the fact that numerous film critics note time and again just how different this film, with its use of natural scenery and real-life constructions, is from his highly stylized and theatricalized pairings of costumes and sets of films such as Nosferatu, Faust, and Sunrise—shares his basic German sensibility so evident in someone like Wagner: love is death.”

     Although Tabu begins in an all-boy paradise celebrating the homoerotic beauty of the young male body in a manner that led Murnau’s more anthropologically-oriented co-filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty to abandon this project, the heterosexual love between the central couple of that film is declared by the island rulers to now be tabu, and therefore must be abandoned. In the 1931 work they do in fact escape, moving on to their own personal paradise, only to be tracked down, The Girl returned to “society,” and The Boy left to drown in his pursuit to save her.

      While no one would dare to describe City Girl as an LGBTQ movie, it is almost necessary viewing, however, for that audience as one of the first films to focus on the mutual enemy of not only heterosexual women, but LGBTQ individuals, and even young heterosexual males who saw themselves as too weak to either join in or fight against patriarchal control. Lem’s late-in-developing “coming of age,” might almost be seen as the very earliest of “coming out” declarations, the hero defining his sexuality as something other than his father’s and mother’s. And incidentally, City Girl is a beautifully expressed work of cinema as well.

 

Los Angeles, January 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2022).