Sunrise (1927)

Why is it that silent-movie melodrama seems so much easier to buy into than modern melodrama? I think it's related to the fact that everything in silent cinema is over-the-top and artificial by design, so the shameless emotional exaggeration of something like this (or Broken Blossoms, or The Last Laugh, or Backstairs, or...) doesn't set off the bullshit detector like, say, Message in a Bottle does. Curiously enough, what the logical mind will tell you is overbaked still feels natural within the mileu of the silent movie. At any rate, this film does have some big bad melodrama in it. But F.W. Murnau's virtuoso direction whups any flaws this film might have and makes the wild mood swings into just another part of his near-flawless tapestry of invention. To watch this is to watch Murnau, one of cinema's first and finest experimentalists, smashing cinematic walls every which way. By film's end, love has triumphed over temptation and the DNA of film technique has been irreversibly altered. What's not to love?

Grade: A-