#82 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

My first silent film!! I actually was not at all excited about this one. The Netflix cover told me that this was going to be a 3-hour movie, so I was going to allow myself to watch this one in segments so I didn't die of boredom. Luckily, though, Netflix counted the two different versions on the disc when it calculated the runtime, so it was only an hour and a half. This thoroughly confused me about 80 minutes in, when everything was coming together, and I had no idea how they were going to fill in another 90 minutes.

Since I feel very confident that no one who reads this will ever see this movie (except you, Sabrina!), here is the story: A married farmer (btw, none of these characters have any names.... not even on the credits) is seduced by a woman "from the city" who's staying in their little town on vacation. The woman from the city convinces him to drown his wife and move with her to the city. When he attempts the murder on a little rowboat in the middle of a lake, his wife begs for mercy, so he comes to his senses and grants her mercy. Once they get back to land, she runs from him into the city, understandably scared of him, which upsets him and inspires him to win her back. Later in the day, they are back in love and happy as ever (one heck of a day). They decide to take a lovely moonlight cruise back to their home, when a storm comes out of nowhere and flips their boat. He swims to land, but she disappears. Obviously distressed over the apparent loss of his wife, he goes out and attempts to then strangle his mistress since it's definitely her fault. In the middle of the strangling, a neighbor walks up with his (live) wife, and all is well! He loves his wife again, and obviously is done with the woman from the city.

When I told Trav the story, he didn't understand how I got all of that from a silent film. I guess the story is so obvious and direct that I never even questioned it. In fact, this movie only had a few title cards so the story's almost exclusively expressed by actions. When the plot line is clear, and the acting is done well, dialogue can be unnecessary. Think of Tom Hanks in Cast Away. That movie did really well despite the fact that it had hardly any dialogue and only had one main character. Tom Hanks is awesome.

I'm apparently in a rambling mood today. In summary, this movie was not at all painful to watch, it held my attention and evoked some emotions, but I'm glad it wasn't a three-hour silent film.

Rating: 7/10

Big Names: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor

Big Lines: nope :)