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Murnau’s CITY GIRL was released (and sparsely at that) in a severely butchered version. Its first five reels were left relatively intact, the second five re-shot with sound by a “director” who was essentially a technician, compressed to two reels, and retained only key establishing scenes from Murnau’s original. No wonder it was regarded as an unbalanced, patchwork quilt of a film. Ironically, that version has vanished but the complete 10 reel silent version, never released, has been found. Even though it was not a film Murnau was entirely satisfied with, due to compromises he had to make, at least the film as it stands is wholly his. One wonders not only why Fox would, as late as ’29, embark on so ambitious a silent film: but also why Murnau was so particularly excited by his subject, which bore a more than casual resemblance to such earlier films as William K. Howard’s WHITE GOLD, William Beaudine’s THE CANADIAN and Victor Seastrom’s THE WIND and several imitations of those. Because of the familiar nature of the content, and because the film is less emotional and less of a technical showcase than SUNRISE, one tends to be disappointed at one’s first exposure to it. It is a quiet and thoughtful film, and compares to SUNRISE much as THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS compares to CITIZEN KANE. But like AMBERSONS, it gains with repeated viewings. There are many who now consider AMBERSONS infinitely superior to KANE; I suspect that the same thing may well happen to CITY GIRL. In any event, it’s a marvelous stroke of luck to have the complete original version available to us, and it further underlines the enormous influence of German film on Fox productions of that period. Of course, German influence was widespread in the late ’20’s. German movies were then both critically and commercially successful, and it was the fashion to copy them. British studios were almost submerged beneath a welter of German themes. German styles, and imported German stars and directors. In Hollywood the same influence extended from King Vidor’s THE CROWD at MGM over to Universal, where Paul Leni was doing THE CAT AND THE CANARY and even “B” westerns had an expressionistic UFA look to them! But at Fox it was rather different. Murnau’s SUNRISE has been an enormous critical and prestige success, if not a box-office one, and Fox’s directors, sincerely in awe of Murnau, literally made their films in his image as a kind of homage to him. Even such essentially American directors as John Ford and Frank Borzage went through their Murnau period. Ford’s FOUR SONS not only re-used the sets from SUNRISE, but for the first time in a long career of brisk movies, he slowed his pace down to match that of Murnau. Borzage’s STREET ANGEL, likewise made in ’28, was even more blatant in its adoration of the master. A rather foolhardy attempt to combine the commercial elements of Borzage’s own SEVENTH HEAVEN with the artistic ones of SUNRISE, it was a pretentious and even silly film, but pictorially it emerged as a kind of zenith in the application of German pictorial expressionism to the American film. Throwing himself into his task with enthusiasm, Borzagc borrowed not only from SUNRISE, but also from Murnau’s earlier TARTUFFE and Lang’s METROPOLIS. Stars (Gaynor am Farrell) apart, the first reel of STREET ANGEL could pass for authentic UFA at any time!

Murnau’s influence extended of course not to directors alone, but to all the craftsmen who worked with him. Thus cameramen and art director took with them into their next project much of Murnau and automatically, of German cinema. Raoul Walsh’s lavish, glossy, no-nonsense romantic melodrama of the Russian Revolution, THE RED DANCE, is graced by some of the most stunningly stylize set design and art direction (mainly the work of Ben Carre) of any American film; Walsh himself was obviously pleased by it, since he re-used much of this footage (of prison labor camps) in his talkie, THE YELLOW TICKET.

While non-Fox Hollywood began to abandon German pictorial style after sound came in, apart from its utilization in the horror film, at Fox such directors as William K. Howard and especially William Dieterle (also newly arrived from Germany) maintained the “look” for several more years. Dieterle’s sensitive and little remembered SIX HOURS TO LIVE is full of both German romanticism and expressionistic shots dating back to Lang’s DESTINY, while his more routine THE DEVIL’S IN LOVE, a Foreign Legion adventure, made impressive use of shadows and forced-perspective effects in some stylized graveyard scenes. The whole story of German influence on the Hollywood film is literally crystallized as never before in this rediscovered group of Fox films where, coincidentally, it was often allied with semi science-fiction themes another genre that Fox ambitiously dabbled in, in this period.

Another major surprise turned up it this treasure-trove is the remarkable degree of experimentation contained in Fox’s early talkies. Not surprisingly most of Fox’s big directors were reluctant to make the transition to sound, situation that was of course duplicated at most of the other studios. It’s not until ’29 that one finds Mamoulian, Vidor, Ford and other major directors making their first talkies; prior to that, the first talkies were made by the studios’ journeymen directors: Irving Cummings, Crane Wilbur, Harry Beaumont. Fox, sold on the staying power of their Movietone sound system as opposed to Warners’ Vitaphone, obviously wanted to iron the bugs out quickly so that major sound films could be undertaken. As a result directors of no major talent were given their head and urged to experiment on relatively routine properties. Just to see what the welding of sound and picture could achieve and what it couldn’t.

John Blystone directed, and Ernest Palmer photographed, a programmer called THROUGH DIFFERENT EVES, RASHOMON-like story in which different versions of a murder were presented to a jury. The intricacies and sophistication of the constantly moving camera were quite remarkable, and while only the silent version has survived, it is possible (from reading the script) to see how sound was used. On a somewhat higher commercial level, another fairly routine director. David Butler, brought to SUNNY SIDE UP (a ’29 0 Gaynor-Farrell musical) elaborate camera movements that would have delighted Max Ophuls – especially an opening sequence in a tenement where the camera, on a crane, swoops up and down from street level to upper stories, tracking along between windows, in long uninterrupted shots. Even in their last, unimportant silent programmers, Fox seems to have left their directors alone. The normally uninventive Irving Cummings rose to the occasion beautifully in ’28’s DRESSED TO KILL, a gangster movie recognizably (but intelligently) patterned on von Sternberg’s UNDERWORLD. It holds up well today, and it’s good to notice that at least one critic – Ward Marsh of the “Cleveland Plain Dealer” – was discerning enough to recognize its quality and place it on his “Ten Best” list for the year.

It’s easy to become jaded when talking, in bulk, about so many rediscovered gems. Films like CITY GIRL, HANGMAN’S HOUSE, THREE BAD MEN, William Farnum’s ’17 A TALE OF TWO CITIES – deserve detailed reappraisals not mere references in passing. But there was nothing jaded about initial reactions to these rediscoveries. Through the courtesy of Alex Gordon, I sat in on many of the exploratory screening sessions, and 1 think that the sense of excitement and real discover that was generated when I first saw John Ford’s PILGRIMAGE – until then just a title to me – provided the most exhilarating session that I’ve ever had in any theatre since I first saw INTOLERANCE (in London in the 40’s) in an original 35mm toned print with a full orchestra accompanying. The knowledge that so much beauty and filmic mastery lay buried but still vitally alive in all of these cans of “useless junk” was, and is, stimulating. The PILGRIMAGE experience was repeated in lesser and differing ways in many other films: the naturalness and seemingly spontaneous small-talk of John Wayne and Ward Bond in Ford’ SALUTE; the stunning pictorial beauty of Lee Garmes’ camerawork in superb toned 35mm print of ZOO IN BUDAPEST, a film every bit as good as it’s cracked up to be, if, alas, a little too innocent to work with audiences today; the charm of DADDY LONG LEGS with Gaynor and Baxter, or the pictorial expertise of their PADDY THE NEXT BEST THING – virtually a show-case for set design and glass shots.

Of course, for every discovery there have been disappointments. The Tom Mix vehicles are every bit as good as they’ve been cracked up to be, and one can readily understand their enormous popularity. But if Mix is well represented, then Theda Bara is hardly represented at all. Fox has her first hit, A FOOL THERE WAS, and one of her least typical, EAST LYNNE. George Eastman House discovered her last (non-Fox) film, a spoof of her own stock in trade, THE UNCHASTENED WOMAN. But of all the big vamp films and spectacles that lay between, nothing. (Henri Langlois constantly tantalizes with reference to a French print of CLEOPATRA, but it is either sadism, masochism, or mere teasing – or all three since he never delivers!) None of the early Herbert Brenon spectacles with Annette Kellerman, reputed to rival Griffith in grandeur, survive. There are none of the many Raoul Walsh films prior to the mid-20’s, and only two late and routine examples of the work of one of their most successful directors. J. Gordon Edwards, grandfather of Blake Edwards. (But at least one of those two, THE SILENT COMMAND, gives us a majestically villainous Bela Lugosi almost a decade before DRACULA). A lesser disappointment was the quality of Fox’s British output. Their big British films were usually done in con junction with Gaumont-British; their fairly large output of “B” product was made solely to comply with British quota laws, and was far less notable than the very impressive roster of British films made by Warner Brothers (almost all of which, incidentally, were destroyed by Warners in Britain some few years ago). Learning that Fox in England was about to destroy all negatives and prints on their British material as being of no value, Gordon promptly asked that it be sent to Hollywood for appraisal. Whereupon Fox in England hemmed and hawed, reluctant to ship this “valuable” material because if lost, it could never be replaced! When the material did arrive, it was of but nominal interest, consisting mainly of unexciting melodramas directed by veteran Albert Parker. Two items were worth the effort however: THE END OF THE ROAD, an unpretentious but quite delightful vehicle for Sir Harry Lauder, and WHERE’S THAT FIRE?, one of the later and better Will Hay comedy specials, long since thought lost, and now restored to British television to the delight of viewers. Perhaps the biggest disappointment of all, apart from the lost films or those too heavily deteriorated to justify preservation, has been the rather lackluster laboratory work in Hollywood. Labs today hate the fussiness of working with old and often shrunken nitrate prints, and will not provide the loving care that they need, to transfer the richness of original (and often tinted) images to new safety acetate film. Archival work is small potatoes to them, for they know that re-orders will be limited. The revenue forthcoming from a tv series where timing is not critical and where the life of a print is not geared to more than a year or two – is much greater. Thus archival printing work is accepted grudgingly, and prints often rushed through with the “grey” look of a tv film. Ford’s magnificently photographed THREE BAD MEN and Borzage’s LAZY BONES in particular have lost a great deal of their original stunning pictorial beauty.

While the preservation of the films themselves is obviously of prime importance, the salvaging of documentation is critical too – for often it is here that the truth of film history can be found. Studios traditionally have been reluctant to release details about grosses, contracts etc., and understandably, since much of that material is of necessity confidential.

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