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).
