Best Director Of 1927-28: F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)

At the time studio head William Fox coaxed him to Holly- wood with the promise of an unlimited budget and complete control over the final product, F.W. Murnau was Europe's best director. Working out of Berlin, which hosted the continent's largest and most important film industry, Murnau had made seventeen films, including two classics of the era, Nosferatu, still the best telling of the Dracula story, and The Last Laugh, possibly the only silent movie ever made without title cards.

Fox's offer was a rare gift in the history of anything, much less motion pictures, and Murnau grabbed the opportunity with both hands. The movie he made, Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans, was not only the best picture of 1927, winning three Oscars in the awards' inaugural year, but is one of the greatest movies ever made.

Sunrise is the story of a marriage in crisis told in a lyrical style that taps into the audience's most basic emotional memories to make it feel the events on screen rather than to simply observe them. The exaggerated story—with attempted murder, near drownings and illicit trysts in muddy fields—is a prime example of Expressionism, an artistic style that appealed to emotions rather than intellect and influenced not only movies but also painting, literature and even architecture.

Because I have already written about Sunrise as the best picture of 1927-28, I want to focus here on Murnau's technique, first, his use of the camera and second, his use of sound.

Watching Sunrise, I was struck by how fluid and modern the camera work is, not just compared to other silent movies but to every movie that followed it until 1941's Citizen Kane. Murnau took advantage of a new electric-powered camera belonging to cinematographer Karl Struss to create swooping, seemingly hand-held tracking shots that helped establish the unsettled and unsettling mood of the story. Because Struss (who with Charles Rosher won the first Oscar for cinematography) did not have to hand-crank the lightweight camera from a stationary position, the camera could be hung from wires and float along with the actors as they moved through fields or through crowded city streets. This floating camera created a sense of "displacement" in the audience, that is, making the seemingly familiar just strange enough to force the viewer to see again as if for the first time.

Murnau also drew on other Express- ionist tech- niques to force his audience to see the familiar again for the first time—sets that looms over the farmer and his wife at impossible angles, strong lighting reminiscent of much-later film noir, and double exposures that reveal a character's thoughts such as the ghostly image of the man's lover embracing him and urging him on to murder.

Murnau also made effective use of sound at a time when other directors saw the new technology as a simple novelty and an excuse to shoe-horn a musical number into every movie. Released two weeks before The Jazz Singer, this was Fox Studios' first tentative foray into sound, and while Sunrise is silent in its lack of dialogue, it included a film score, sound effects, and although not yet synchronized to the images on the screen, even human voices.

After watching dozens of silent films while working on this blog, I was reminded again from the first moments of Sunrise just how powerful a music score is and what a difference it can make in setting a mood. Even before the opening credits are finished, the violin score establishes a sense of foreboding and the viewer is prepared for the conflict and violence that soon follows.

It seems obvious to say that a score written specifically for a movie creates a deeper emotional involvement that does a little random Wulitzer music, but if you see enough of these back-to-back-to-back, it jumps out at you nevertheless.

The score does something else, too. By creating a mood with a simple tune, it eliminates the need for many of the movie's title cards (those bits of written dialogue or explanation inserted between frames) which is a welcome relief. Pure exposition doesn't work any better in a movie than it does in a novel and it certainly doesn't work well when it's typed up and inserted into the middle of a love scene or an action sequence.

The use of sound isn't limited to the score and its effect is not merely a way to keep your ears busy while your eyes are working. Any number of sound effects—train whistles, barking dogs, squealing pigs—convey information beyond mere ambiance. Chiming clocks, for example, signal shifts in mood in Sunrise that might otherwise come as a surprise to the viewer.

And shifts in mood is as much what this movie is about as any mechanics of the plot. That Murnau was one of the first to understand how to use sound to create a specific effect is just one more reason why he is still considered one of history's greatest directors and wins the Katie for best director of 1927-28.

Unfortunately, Murnau's achievements went largely ignored. Sunrise was a masterpiece but failed in the only way that mattered to the studio—at the box office—and although the Academy acknowledged the film with three awards, including the only Oscar ever given for "Unique and Artistic Production," Murnau himself was not nominated for best director (neither, for that matter, was William A. Wellman who had directed the "other" best picture winner, Wings). The studio clipped Murnau's wings, limiting his budgets and reasserting control over the content and final cut of his movies.

Worse for the development of movies themselves, however, was the fact that cumbersome new sound-recording cameras made it impossible for other directors to follow Murnau's lead even had studio owners encouraged them to do so. Cameras of the era, even the hand-held ones used in Sunrise, were so loud they made sound recording impossible and they had to be enclosed in soundproof booths with the camera operator locked inside. The result was the theater stage look—medium and long shots with no movement whatsoever—that makes early sound movies so off-putting to a modern audience. It was not until 1958 that France's New Wave directors rediscovered the hand-held camera.

His creative freedom drastically limited, Murnau made two more movies for Fox, both critical and commercial failures, then left America for the South Pacific to work on the last great film of his career, Tabu, a love story between a young fisherman and a woman whom religious authorities have deemed sacred and therefore taboo. A week before the film's premiere, Murnau was killed in an automobile accident. He was 42.

I find it interesting that the greatest directors of the silent era, Murnau, Keaton, Chaplin, von Stroheim, Griffith, largely failed to make the transition to sound movies. There were individual reasons in each case—Griffith never progressed beyond the same simple story of virginity imperiled, Keaton's new contract with MGM proved to be a straightjacket, von Stroheim was an egomaniac, Chaplin was a slow-working perfectionist. And of course Murnau had the best excuse of all: he died.

But the overall impression is that an entire generation of great directors vanished, leaving the field to inferior hacks, and that this is how the studios wanted it. Film historians have suggested that the studios used the transition to sound as an opportunity to break well-paid directors (and actors) who had become too big for their britches.

I also suspect that to a degree, the directors themselves failed to adjust to the necessity of telling stories so badly after a decade of telling them so well. I'll note that given the opportunity to make Tabu as a sound picture, Murnau chose to make it a silent. Like many great directors of that era, if given the choice, he preferred silent pictures. The marketplace simply didn't allow that choice.

In any event, with the greatest directors gone or their output severely limited, and with the technology restricting their artistry, the directors who were left seemed to have forgotten how to make movies. It was more than a decade before John Ford, Orson Welles and others rediscovered the lessons Murnau taught and used them to bring motion pictures into the modern era.

A final postscript. Almost seventy years after Murnau's death, John Malkovich played him in the movie Shadow Of The Vampire, a fictionalized account of the making of Murnau's most famous work, Nosferatu. The movie is a sometimes funny, sometimes violent meditation on the damage an artist does in creating a masterpiece. In the case of Sunrise, a true masterpiece, the damage Murnau did was to his own career.

Meaningless Trivia: Out of curiosity, I looked up the total number of votes on the Internet Movie Database for movies made during the Silent Era (1900-1928). Not the average vote, mind you, just the raw totals, to get a sense of how many 21st century eyes have watched silent movies and which ones they're watching.

The top ten movies released before 1929 in terms of total imdb.com votes (with the director's name in parentheses):

Metropolis (Fritz Lang) 32,291

Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau) 24,422

The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin) 17,038

The General (Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman) 16,397

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein) 14,815

The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine) 14,115

The Kid (Charles Chaplin) 10,275

The Passion Of Joan Of Arc (Carl Theodor Dreyer) 9,048

Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (F.W. Murnau) 8,851

The Birth Of A Nation (D.W. Griffith) 7,524

Sherlock Jr. (Buster Keaton) 5,284

Well, there it is, for what it's worth, which is, admittedly, not a lot. I would recommend any of the movies on the list except The Birth Of A Nation which would come as quite a shock to a modern audience and likely turn you off silent movies for good unless you've really prepared yourself for its stunningly racist views on American history not to mention its three hour running time which in a silent movie can feel like three weeks.

By the way, in case you're wondering, the most voted upon movie (as far as I can tell) is The Shawshank Redemption with 421,872 votes ...

While I'm Working On My Essay About Director F.W. Murnau, Pass The Time With This

Silent Star Smackdown: Lon Chaney versus Douglas Fairbanks

While I've been busy working on essays about F.W. Murnau, Jean Hersholt and Clara Bow, as well as researching the Katie awards for 1928-29, two of my most famous readers, Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks, have been engaged in a bit of verbal smackdown in the comments section. Fairbanks claims Chaney "couldn't carry my saddlebags," while Chaney says Fairbanks "couldn't act [his] way out of a paper bag."

I invite all my faithful readers to weigh in on this most vital debate.

The Tale Of The Tape:

Lon Chaney
Birth Name: Leonidas Frank Chaney
Nickname: Man Of A Thousand Faces
Trademark: Master of early makeup techniques
Born: April 1, 1883
Height: 5'9"
Films: 161, including The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom Of The Opera (1925) and Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928)
Katie Awards: 1 win for Best Actor of 1927-28, 1 nomination for Best Actor Of The Silent Era
Other Awards: twice commemorated on U.S. stamps; first actor to be made honorary member of U.S. Marine Corps for his portrayal of a drill instructor in Tell It To The Marines (1926)
Other Achievements: directed 6 movies, wrote 6
Marriages: 2
Famous Children: Lon Chaney, Jr.
Salary: $3,750 per week The Unholy Three (1930)

Douglas Fairbanks
Birth Name: Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman
Born: May 23, 1883
Trademark: Stunt work
Height: 5'9"
Films: 49, including The Mark Of Zorro (1920), The Thief Of Bagdad (1924) and The Gaucho (1927)
Katie Awards: 1 nomination for Best Actor Of The Silent Era
Other Awards: Honorary Oscar (1940); Photoplay's Medal of Honor for Robin Hood (1922)
Other Achievements: co-founded United Artists, first president of AMPAS, produced 24 movies, wrote 18, directed 2.
Marriages: 3, including to Katie Award winner Mary Pickford
Famous Children: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.
Salary: $300,000 for Reaching For The Moon (1930)

Analysis: The film record indicates Chaney had tremendous upper body strength and likely could have carried anybody's saddlebags, let alone Fairbanks's. On the other hand, I have yet to see any movie where Fairbanks began a scene in a bag, so I can't say definitively whether he ever acted his way out of one. He did make one movie with Mary Pickford, though, 1929's The Taming Of The Shrew, so draw your own conclusions.

My personal opinion? A well-rounded film collection contains the work of both.

Keep it clean, gents.

Late Programming Note: A Mary Pickford And Douglas Fairbanks Double Feature On TCM Tonight

Straight from the Turner Classic Movies website:

8:00 PM Ramona (1910) In this silent short, a rancher's daughter runs off with a Native. Cast: Mary Pickford, Henry B. Walthall, Francis J. Grandon. Dir: D.W. Griffith. C-17 mins,

8:30 PM Mark of Zorro, The (1920) In this silent film, a Mexican Robin Hood harasses corrupt Spanish invaders. Cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Marguerite de la Motte, Noah Beery. Dir: Fred Niblo. BW-107 mins, TV-G

I confess I know nothing about Ramona other than to say it is very early Mary Pickford and only 17 minutes long. The Mark Of Zorro is classic Douglas Fairbanks.

I think this is part of TCM's on-going series "Race and Hollywood." This month the network is highlighting Latino Images In Film.

Hollywood Couples: Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks

She was America's Sweetheart; he was the reigning king of the Fun-Stupid movie. Together, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks became Hollywood's most celebrated couple during the final years of the Silent Era.

Pickford and Fairbanks were both already married when they met a party in 1916 and they conducted a secret affair for years before she obtained a divorce in March 1920 (Fairbanks had divorced in November of the previous year). The couple married twenty-six days after Pickford's divorce became final.

Although the state of Nevada contested the legality of Pickford's Reno divorce (the issue wasn't settled until 1922) and the couple feared negative publicity, movie fans the world over enthusiastically approved of the marriage. On their honeymoon in Europe, the pair were swarmed by adoring fans and twice had to be smuggled out of harm's way, once through a window in what the New York Times referred to as a Parisian butcher's "meat cage."

When they weren't dodging crowds, Pickford and Fairbanks made some of the most successful films of the Silent Era and, along with Charles Chaplin, founded United Artists in an effort to gain creative control over their films and to reap a larger share of the profits.

The two were also the first to immortalize their handprints in concrete in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre.

In 1920, Pickford and Fairbanks bought a hunting lodge and renovated it into a 22-room mansion they named "Pickfair." The two threw lavish parties and entertained some of the most famous people in the world. To be invited to their home was to gain admittance into the closed circle of Hollywood royalty.

Ironically, the love affair which began in secret unraveled because the two spent so much time in public. Between work, business and entertaining, the two rarely had time alone together. And I'm just speculating, but I imagine it didn't help that both of them had grown too old to play the roles for which they had become famous, the Hollywood equivalent of empty-nest syndrome.

As their careers faded, both began extramarital affairs. In 1927, on the set of My Best Girl, Pickford fell in love with co-star Charles "Buddy" Rogers, eleven years her junior, and on a trip to Europe, Fairbanks began an affair with English socialite, Lady Sylvia Ashley. Pickford and Fairbanks divorced in 1933.

Later Pickford said of Fairbanks that he was "[a] little boy who never grew up" and that "[i]n his private life Douglas always faced a situation in the only way he knew, by running away from it."

Fairbanks married Lady Ashley soon after his divorce from Pickford. He died of a heart attack three years later at the age of 56. His last words were, "I've never felt better."

After Fairbanks death, Pickford and Rogers married and she and Rogers remained married for forty-two years, living a reclusive life together at Pickfair until her death in 1979.

A Postscript: Some years after Pickford's death, the notorious actress Pia Zadora bought the Pickfair mansion and had it demolished to make way for a mansion of her own. She said Pickfair was full of termites. Personally, I think Pia, who has won four Razzies, is full of termites. But it's her birthday today, so happy birthday, Pia, ya #@%&!

Best Actress Of 1927-28: Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)

Mary Pickford was the most popular actress of the Silent Era, earning the nickname "America's Sweetheart" with a series of winning performances as the plucky girl who overcomes long odds in such movies as Stella Maris, Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm and Tess Of The Storm Country. Film historian Scott Eyman has called her the "perfect incarnation" of the sweet but strong-willed girl and audiences flocked to her movies in record numbers, making her at her peak the highest paid performer in Hollywood.

My Best Girl was Pickford's last silent performance and arguably her best.

The story was a typical one for Pickford. "Maggie" is a working class shopgirl who meets and falls in love with Joe (played by Charles "Buddy" Rogers, who was quickly cast in the part after his success in the blockbuster war picture Wings), not realizing he is the son of the store's owner.

It's a fairly conventional set-up, but it's what Pickford does with it that makes it worth watching. In the opening scene, she carries an armful of pots and pans through a crowded department store, gets a pot stuck on her foot and in trying to shake it loose, ends up losing her bloomers instead. As Pickford scrambles to free her hands, another woman steps into Pickford's undies, assumes to her horror that they are her own, and winds up hiking them up under her own skirt.

That Pickford then meets the boy of her dreams while she feels a cool breeze blowing up her skirt is implied rather than explicitly stated, but you have to wonder what Charles Rogers was thinking when he knelt at Pickford's feet in the scene pictured here—the two fell in love and married after Pickford's divorce from Douglas Fairbanks.

Naturally, the course of true love never runs smooth, at least not in the movies. Joe has a wealthy fiancee and an overbearing father, and Maggie has family problems of her own: her mother is a slovenly depressive who attends the funerals of strangers—"I haven't had such a good cry since our wedding"—her sister is a flapper dating a gangster, and her father is an ineffectual milquetoast who sits in his wingback chair, chews on his moustache and frets as his family comes unglued.

Just bringing a man home for dinner requires more courage and finesse than most of us can muster in our greatest moment of crisis.

If you played this stuff seriously, you'd have Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams; if you played it half way, you'd have Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. My Best Girl is played strictly for laughs and what you wind up with is a nifty little comedy, albeit one only as good as the actress playing the title role. Pickford straps this potentially creaky vehicle to her back and carries it the whole way, making it feel fresh and light and funny while steering effortlessly clear of the pathos that would have brought it crashing down.

As film critic Steve Vineberg says, the performance is "an extraordinary combination of spunk and delicacy."

It's also at times unusually physical. I hadn't thought about it before until I saw Pickford doing physical comedy here—pratfalls and slapstick—that Hollywood has tended to shy away from asking women to do the sort of physical comedy Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Curly Howard and even Cary Grant did routinely. Lucille Ball had a gift for it, at least on her television shows, and occasionally an actress in a screwball comedy, Carole Lombard, say, would do some bit of business that required a little slapstick. But not often. Mary Pickford showed a flair for it throughout her career and is near the top of a pretty short list.

My Best Girl was released just three weeks after The Jazz Singer and was Pickford's last silent movie.

Pickford wasn't thrilled with the introduction of sound—"Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo"—but she was perceptive enough to realize that it added an extra degree of realism to the movies that made the prospect of a thirty-five year old actress playing nineteen year olds untenable. She was tired of that kind of role anyway. "I'm sick of Cinderella parts," she said, "of wearing rags and tatters. I want to wear smart clothes and play the lover."

The next year, she bobbed her hair—a controversial act because of her iconic status as the perfect representative of traditional womanhood—and took on a more sophisticated role for her first sound picture, Coquette. She won an Oscar for the effort, but critics panned the performance and to be honest, the award had more to do with Pickford's skills as a party hostess—she's credited with being the first person in history to lobby for an Oscar—than with the quality of anything she did onscreen.

The public rejected her attempts to play more adult roles and, being too old to any longer play feisty shopgirls and teenage ingenues, Pickford retired from acting in 1933.

According to TCM's Robert Osborne, she attempted to make a comeback in 1947, testing for the movie Life With Father, but when that role went to Irene Dunne instead, Pickford made her retirement permanent.

During her career, Pickford appeared in 249 movies, produced 34 more (including one as late as 1949) and authored twelve. Along with Charlie Chaplin and then-husband Douglas Fairbanks, she founded United Artists. Despite her screen image as a sweet, innocent working class girl, she was actually a tough, smart businesswoman who remained an active owner at the head of the studio she founded.

As her biographer Eileen Whitfield wrote, "She knew what she was worth, and she didn't hesitate to ask for it. She was a woman in complete control."

In 1976 the Academy which she herself had co-founded awarded her an Oscar for lifetime achievement. She died at the age of 87.

Before There Was Heath Ledger, There Was Conrad Veidt

The Man Who Laughs is a macabre little love story that begins with a decadent king's order to carve a permanent grin into the face of a boy whose father has been convicted of treason. The boy grows to manhood earning an unhappy but lucrative living as a circus freak, shunning all human contact but that of the young blind woman who travels with him.

Through a series of twists plotted by the great Victor Hugo, whose novel L'Homme Qui Rit was the basis for this movie, the man (Conrad Veidt in a first-rate performance) finds himself elevated to Britain's House of Lords and ordered against his will to marry a brazen duchess with a fetish for his ruined face.

It sounds like the stuff of a pretty ludicrous melodrama but thanks to Veidt—better known to movie fans as Casablanca's Major Strasser—The Man Who Laughs is actually one of the best movies of 1928.

I mention it here because Veidt, who played the part wearing a prosthesis that pulled his lips into that horrible grin, inspired the role that earlier this year won Heath Ledger an Oscar.

Depending on who you believe, either Bill Finger and Batman creator Bob Kane concocted the Joker from a photograph of Veidt in full Man Who Laughs makeup; or illustrator Jerry Robinson conceived the Joker from a playing card and then fleshed out the character based on a photograph of Veidt that Finger provided. (Apparently this is one of those bitter tempests in a teapot that only people with too much free time and not enough recognition can brew up.)

The one thing, however, that all the participants can agree on is that Veidt was central to the creation of the Joker's bizarre look.

The character of the Joker has gone through many changes since his creation in the Spring of 1940, from sociopath to comic jester and back again. A number of actors have inhabited the role, including Cesar Romero, Jack Nicholson and, of course, Ledger.

But all incarnations of the Joker have included the rictus grin that Conrad Veidt first introduced to the screen and without his performance in The Man Who Laughs, we can only guess at who the Dark Knight would have done battle with in last summer's biggest blockbuster. You can just be sure it wouldn't have been the fascinating psychopath that Ledger essayed so brilliantly.

Remember that the next time some snot-nosed kid tell you old movies are irrelevant.

Best Actor Of 1927-28: Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)

Earning the nickname "The Man of a Thousand Faces" with his skill as an actor and as a makeup artist, Lon Chaney had a gift for making the grotesque look real then imbuing his creations with a humanity that reaches right off the screen. Better known for his roles in the silent versions of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame and The Phantom Of The Opera, Chaney's performance in the tragic love story Laugh, Clown, Laugh may very well be the best of his career and is my choice for the best performance by actor for the year 1927-28.

Laugh, Clown, Laugh is the story of Tito Beppi, an aging circus performer who raises an abandoned child as his own only to find to his horror and his shame that when she grows to young womanhood he is falling hopelessly in love with her. Tito wrestles with feelings of guilt and, despite his enormous professional success, falls into a deep depression. The girl (played by a fourteen year old Loretta Young a full twenty years before she won an Oscar for The Farmer's Daughter) is unaware of Tito's feelings and complicates matters by falling in love with a close friend of her stepfather.

That by the end of the film the three participants of this unhappy love triangle are motivated by genuine affection and self- sacrificing concern for one another makes the tragic denouement all the more poignant.

Norma Desmond claimed silent stars acted with their faces—Lon Chaney really did. He had to. Often he was buried under layers of make-up and prosthetics and with the limitations of silent film that robbed him of a voice and a soundtrack to cue a mood, he was reduced to telling stories with his eyes. That he was able to convey deeply-felt transformations of character with little more than a look is a testament to his hard work and talent.

Here, Chaney moves from portraying the energy and contentment of a consummate professional in love with his work to the tears and self-loathing of a man in love with the girl he has raised as a daughter and is somehow able to make this troubled and troubling character sympathetic. It was the sort of delicate task he accomplished on film many times.

Years later, Loretta Young said of Chaney, who took great pains to help her with her first starring role, "I shall be beholden to that sensitive, sweet man until I die."

The same year Laugh, Clown, Laugh arrived in theaters, Chaney also starred in London After Midnight, a highly-regarded vampire thriller that may have been an even better showcase for Chaney's talent. Unfortunately, London After Midnight was destroyed in a fire at an MGM warehouse in 1967, an all-too-common end for many Silent Era films.

In 2002, film historian Rick Schmidlin produced a truncated form of London After Midnight for Turner Classic Movies from a series of still photographs and the film's screenplay. I've seen this version and while it's almost impossible to judge the movie itself from what's left, nothing I saw dissuaded me from my opinion that Chaney's work was the best of 1927-28.

After Laugh, Clown, Laugh, Chaney made one sound picture, a commercially-successful remake of one of his silent classics, The Unholy Three, and was slated to star in a number of other sound movies, including Tod Browning's classic Dracula and the Oscar-winning prison drama, The Big House. Shortly after his sound debut, however, he died of cancer. He was only 47.

Over the course of a film career that spanned eighteen years and 161 movies, Chaney developed into one of the greatest actors of the Silent Era. In addition to his film appearances, Chaney also directed six movies. In 1957, James Cagney starred in a movie about Chaney's life, appropriately named Man Of A Thousand Faces.

After Chaney's death, his son, Lon Chaney, Jr., carried on the acting tradition and appeared in nearly 200 movies and television shows, including a starring role in the 1939 classic Of Mice And Men.

A Side Note: It's easy to forget that before Hollywood began to censor itself in mid-1934 with the enforcement of the Production Code, movies were often as explicit and frank as anything we're accustomed to seeing now. In Laugh, Clown, Laugh, there's a scene where an aristocrat (Nils Asther) kneels to remove Loretta Young's stocking and kiss her bare foot, a scene of raw sensuality that helps explain both why he is obsessed with the girl and why she finds him simultaneously fascinating and repulsive.

I was reminded of scenes in other pre-Code movies I've seen recently—Clara Bow flashing her bare breasts in Wings, a woman breast-feeding a baby in The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, and Joan Blondell's tendency to strip down to her bra and panties in practically everything she starred in—scenes which serve as proof for those who need it that baby boomers didn't invent sex at Woodstock.

As I will eventually cover, the Production Code would soon forbid scenes such as those in Laugh, Clown, Laugh. Films from the pre-Code era would be bowdlerized or buried and, in either case, forgotten. It would take a later generation to reintroduce explicit imagery into the movies and then congratulate itself for inventing what had already been perfected—art, and its Siamese twin, exploitation.

Best Picture Of 1927-28: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

The history of the Academy Awards, particularly when it comes to the best picture award, is a study in predictable middle-of-the-road conformity. The Academy has long favored dramas and biopics that turned a respectable profit; were artistic, but not too artistic; and above all, fit safely within a preconceived notion about what a movie is supposed to be. How else to explain the choice of, say, 1944's pleasant but predictable Going My Way over the groundbreaking noir classic Double Indemnity?

When Oscar does go out on a limb and choose something edgy, it's most often a so-called message picture—a drama seeking to teach a political or social lesson—albeit one with a message that Hollywood is already quite comfortable with. That's why you wind up with a head-scratcher like Crash but never with something truly controversial like Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (well, okay, let's not get nuts here).

What Oscar doesn't do is pick a movie that twenty years later is still regarded as the best picture of the year. It's hard enough to do when you're trying, impossible when you're not.

That the first time out of the box the Academy should have managed to hand the Oscar for best picture (well, Unique and Artistic Production, anyway) to what time has revealed to be not just the best picture of the year but one of the best of all time is nothing short of a miracle. Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans is beautiful, lyrical, a deceptively simple film that plumbs the depths of a marriage—and a soul—in crisis.

Directed by the great F.W. Murnau, who had previously helmed such classics as Nosferatu and The Last Laugh, Sunrise starts out as a silent era film noir with a beautiful temptress from the city persuading a handsome young farmer (George O'Brien) to murder his wife. The city woman (Margaret Livingston) is a classic 1920s era flapper, with bobbed hair, cigarettes and a slinky black dress.

By contrast, the country wife, played by Janet Gaynor in an Oscar-winning performance, looks like she just blew in out of "American Gothic"—with a gingham dress, blonde hair in a bun and a baby on her shoulder—and as the opening scenes unfolded, I expected the lesson of the tale to be either (1) country = good; city = bad; or (2) men, don't marry women who dress like your grandmothers.

A third of the way through the movie, however, the farmer (who has lured his wife into the city so he can murder her) has a change of heart and from then on, the movie becomes a surprisingly touching story of reconciliation and redemption.

That this abrupt shift in tone works so brilliantly is a testament to Murnau's skill as a director and also, I think, to the very human nature of the conflict within the farmer's heart.

Admittedly, the story is not realistic in the sense we've come to understand that word, a documentary-like fidelity to the world as it is. Instead, the story is what I would call operatic, painting with bold brushstrokes to evoke a series of strong emotional responses, and while the facts are not realistic, the emotions those facts evoke are.

Which is to say, from the outside, adultery may look sordid but it's pretty typical and not very interesting, whereas from the inside it plays like a grand operatic passion and the mad desire for a woman and the guilt, doubt and anxiety associated with leaving your wife feels a little like murder (or so they tell me). To tell this story in a way more true to the facts would be to lie about the feelings. And Murnau clues us in with the very title of the movie—it's a song of two humans, not a story of two humans—that it's emotional truth he's after.

This operatic search for emotional truth is what film critics are talking about when they speak of "Expressionism." It's a term I'd heard kicked around and I thought for a long time it had something to do with cinematography and weird, abstract sets, but it's primarily about evoking an emotional response in an audience and as an artistic movement it influenced not just movies but painting, literature and even architecture.

Which you no doubt knew already. Me, they didn't talk about this stuff in law school.

As an approach to storytelling, Expressionism is largely alien to a modern audience. Somewhere along the way, we bought into the idea that Realism, with a capital "R," is the only way to create a realistic portrait of the human experience. But Realism is just a technique and artists have explored any number of ways to convey truth, from Impressionism to Cubism to Reality Game Shows. Murnau was merely experimenting with another way to say something true about the human condition.

That Hollywood long ago abandoned this approach doesn't make it invalid, just unfamiliar.

Sunrise won three Oscars at the first ceremony, for Unique and Artistic Production, Actress (Janet Gaynor) and Cinematography (Charles Rosser and Karl Struss).

Sunrise's reputation as a movie has only grown since. The influential French film magazine, Cahiers du cinéma, called Sunrise "the single greatest masterwork in the history of the cinema." In a critics poll conducted in 2002 for Sight and Sound magazine, it was chosen as one of the ten best movies ever made. It also ranked #82 on the AFI's list of the 100 greatest American movies of all time and was selected in 1989 for the National Film Registry.

Although Sunrise was critically acclaimed at the time and later, however, it was not a success at the box office. The scenes set in the city were not filmed on location but on a vast and very expensive set and perhaps it was inevitable that given a blank check and a promise of no interference from the studio, Murnau made a movie that couldn't make back its expenses.

As I will discuss when I write about my choice for best director, after the box office failure of Sunrise, the studio reigned in Murnau who never again directed a film of this quality. It was a story repeated time and again as movies made the transition from silence to early sound.

[To read my essay about F.W. Murnau, click here.]

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards For 1927-28

PICTURE: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox)

ACTOR: Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)

ACTRESS: Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)

DIRECTOR: F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jean Hersholt (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Clara Bow (Wings)

SCREENPLAY: King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd)

SPECIAL AWARDS: The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin) (Best Picture-Comedy); Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer) (Best Actor-Comedy or Musical); Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd) (Best Actress-Drama); George Groves (The Jazz Singer) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Toot Toot Tootsie" (The Jazz Singer) (Best Song); Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) (Cinematography)

MUST-SEE MOVIES OF 1927-28: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans; The Man Who Laughs; The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg; The Circus; Wings; The Crowd; Laugh, Clown, Laugh

The most popular movie of 1927 was The Jazz Singer, which introduced synchronized sound to the movies at last. Audiences were thrilled not just to see Al Jolson singing but to hear him singing—and after plowing through dozens of silent movies in the past couple of weeks, I can't say I blame them. You forget how much information you process through your ears and how much pleasure you can get from a human voice—at least until you do without for a while.

Only one problem with The Jazz Singer: it's a terrible movie. Really. I mean, yeah, being able to put sound in a movie was a tremendous breakthrough and audiences ate it up with a spoon, but beyond it's importance now as a historical footnote, I can't recommend it.

As for everything else that was released between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928 (I'm following Oscar's convention of straddling the two years), the Academy actually did a pretty good job of distinguishing the wheat from the chaff even if the awards were largely parceled out as a result of insider politicking and studio manipulation.

Wings (Best Production) and Sunrise (Unique and Artistic Production) won the two best picture awards, Emil Jannings was a well-respected actor and won for The Way Of All Flesh and The Last Command (remember, the award in those days was handed out for a body of work rather than a specific picture), and best actress winner, Janet Gaynor, was the star of the best movie of the year, Sunrise.

There were two best director trophies that year, one for comedy, one for drama. Lewis Milestone, who would win another Oscar for directing the classic All Quiet On The Western Front, won for the former; Frank Borzage, another two time winner, won the latter.

All respectable choices. With the benefit of more than eighty years worth of hindsight, however, I think the Academy could have done better.

That's where the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards come in.

I've done away with the splitting of categories—one director instead of two, one best picture award instead of the unexplained and unexplainable Best Production and Unique and Artistic Production awards.

I'm also doing away with Academy's habit of spreading the award for writing across a wide variety of ever-changing categories, including best original screenplay, best adapted screenplay, motion picture story, story and screenplay, screenplay and even this year's award for "title writing." With the Katies, it's one award, Best Screenplay, regardless of whether it's based on another source, wholly original or, as is often the case, a thinly disguised rip-off of last year's popular movie.

As I did with the career achieve- ment awards for the Silent Era, I will explain my choices in a series of essays over the next couple of weeks.

I've also included here a list of what I think are the must-see movies of the year, and will include a must-see list for each year I hand out awards.

Finally, I have included choices for best supporting actor and actress even though the Academy did not create those categories until 1936. I felt I otherwise would have ended up ignoring too many performances worth recognition. Besides, it gave me another excuse to see even more movies—and what could be wrong with that?

Notes: I don't have an official Fun-Stupid movie pick for 1927-28, but two might fit the bill: Wings is overly long for a silent movie and a bit corny but it also has at least an hour's worth of some of the best stunt flying and aerial dogfights ever filmed; and Charlie Chaplin's The Circus features a lot of physical comedy and acrobatic stunts and is readily available.