by Vanda Krefft
Murnau might have wondered why Fox Film was surrounding Sunrise with complete secrecy, refusing to screen the movie for anyone. But why would he wonder about that? A few years before, the studio had kept John Ford’s The Iron Horse an even greater mystery, precisely because it had such great faith in the work. Anticipating a brilliant American career, Murnau boarded the White Star Line’s RMS Olympic—which was, ominously, the last surviving sister ship of the RMS Titanic and the HMHS Britannic, the first having met its fate with an iceberg in 1912 and the latter sinking after hitting an underwater mine in the Aegean Sea in November 1916. Fox personally saw Murnau off at the pier, bestowing “fifty dollars’ worth of flowers and twenty-five dollars’ worth of fruit.”
Five days later, Fox publicly praised “Dr. Murnau” as “the genius of this age.”
In April 1927, the Roxy Theatre program indicated that Sunrise would soon play there, with theater manager Samuel Rothafel touting it as “the greatest motion picture that I have ever seen.”
A month later, the situation changed drastically. Murnau, eager to return to Hollywood, arranged for an early release from his UFA contract, and on May 18, 1927, he cabled Sheehan to say he would be available from July onward. When did they want him to start? No reply. On June 11, Murnau wrote to Sheehan pleading for information. The response isn’t known, but it couldn’t have been encouraging, because Murnau would remain in Germany well past his new contract’s official start date of August 21, 1927.
Likely, thoughts at the studio had turned from art to the tough challenges of marketing and promotion. Sunrise had been a very expensive movie to make. When production began in September 1926, its expected negative cost (the expense of producing the film negative, excluding distribution and marketing costs) was $750,000. By completion in early 1927, that number had escalated to $1.2 million, twice as much as the studio had spent for What Price Glory and three times as much as for The Iron Horse. In 1927, most feature films cost from $25,000 to $250,000, and movies that crossed the $1 million line were almost always historical epics with period scenery, lavish costumes, and casts of thousands.
Sheehan had told Murnau to make a modern American film, and Murnau had promised to do so. He hadn’t.
Where was the modernity in an unshaven George O’Brien clomping around in heavy farmer’s boots and rustic work clothes? In Janet Gaynor’s plain, frumpy, long dresses with their full skirts, or in that blonde wig plastered on her head with its odd coiled braid at the back of her neck? In the couple’s old-fashioned cottage with its simple wooden furniture? In Gaynor tossing feed to chickens scrabbling around outside their front door? The city scenes did speak of dazzling newness, but the sets had an artificial tidiness that contrasted markedly with the grime and disorder familiar to most American urban dwellers. Murnau’s frequent use of multiple exposures and other special effects enhanced the aura of unreality.
And where was the Americanness? Despite all his assurances to the contrary, Murnau had continued to think of Sunrise as a German story. When the movie began production in September 1926, the main characters were still officially named, as they had been in the Sudermann short story, Ansass and Indre. Janet Gaynor recalled that when she tested for the role of Indre, Murnau had a specific image in mind: “So I had to get dressed in these drab clothes, and put on a blonde wig, so that I really looked like a German woman.” In the movie, when the man calls out for his wife, O’Brien looks as if he’s saying, “Indre,” and when a neighbor calls out to him, she looks as if she’s saying, “Ansass.” The city also has a European ambience, with its irregular, curving layout instead of the standard American grid design.
A movie about old-fashioned-looking characters set in a time and place not recognizable as modern America—Sunrise would clearly have to fight for an audience. In the late 1920s, the motion picture marketplace was dominated by glamorous stars such as Clara Bow, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Gloria Swanson, and John Barrymore, and by momentous, sensational, expansive stories. The first half of 1927 had seen the release of Bow’s It (Paramount); Children of Divorce (Paramount), again with Bow; and Cecil B. De Mille’s King of Kings, about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Upcoming were Paramount’s Wings, a fighter pilot war picture that aimed to exploit the public’s fascination with aviation following Charles Lindbergh’s May 1927 transatlantic solo flight; the gritty gangster picture Underworld (Paramount); and, fatefully, The Jazz Singer (Warner Bros.) as the world’s first talking picture feature film.
With American audiences, German Expressionism had not fared well so far that year. Upon its U.S. release in March 1927, Fritz Lang’s dystopian science-fiction epic Metropolis drew a withering response. In his review for the New York Times, H. G. Wells described Metropolis as “the silliest film,” an “idiotic spectacle” concocted from a “soupy whirlpool” of clichéd, confused, and “immensely” dull ideas. Would Sunrise likewise be perceived as pretentious nonsense?
Fox Film was able to neutralize some of the foreignness and unfamiliarity of Sunrise by removing the characters’ names, so that O’Brien and Gaynor were now simply “The Man” and “The Wife.” In the same spirit, an opening title card proclaimed that the story could take place anywhere and anytime. For further audience friendliness, Friedrich W. Murnau became “Fred W. Murnau.” There was nothing, however, that anyone could do about the nineteenth-century-style country scenes and costumes.
The movie’s presentation to the public would have to be handled very carefully. Although as late as August 1927, Roxy Theatre programs continued to indicate that Sunrise would open there, Fox decided he couldn’t take the risk, for the sake of both the 5,920-seat theater and the movie. He was still trying to refinance the Roxy’s $2 million in debt that he had inherited from builder Herbert Lubin, and a sea of empty seats would persuade no one to give him the money. Sunrise also could not afford any embarrassment. In order to entice exhibitors nationwide into booking it, the movie had to look like a grand success in New York. It was much better to sell out a small house than to hear the wind whistling through a cavernous palace.
As a result, even though he had bought the Roxy so he wouldn’t have to do this anymore, Fox rented the 1,080-seat Times Square Theater and prepared to open Sunrise there on September 23, 1927. The Fox Film publicity department, never at a loss for orotund rhetoric, worked its superlatives to the point of exhaustion. According to the movie’s press book, Sunrise was “The most important picture in the history of the movies,” masterfully portraying “the great problems to today—the struggle of the home against the world’s temptations” and suffused with “terrific” emotional appeal that not even “the Stoniest Heart” could resist. The studio went so far as to predict that Sunrise would become The Birth of a Nation of its time, revolutionizing the art of film. If that kind of rackety drum beating was out of character with the movie’s sublime spirit, it was still the language most likely to draw the public’s attention.
To liven up Sunrise and coincidentally promote the Movietone system while the rest of the industry was making up its mind about sound, Fox added a synchronized soundtrack with music and sound effects* for the Times Square engagement. Sunrise had, of course, been made as a silent picture because very few theaters had yet been wired for sound. By the end of 1927, only fifty-five U.S. theaters were equipped to play Movietone.
Worried that Sunrise alone wouldn’t pull in enough patrons, Fox augmented the debut program with a twenty-minute Movietone talking newsreel titled “Voices of Italy,” featuring—the first time one of his speeches had been recorded—Benito Mussolini. A Fox News crew had corralled Il Duce in Rome and persuaded him to address the American public. In heavily accented English, looking stern, forty-four-year-old Mussolini nevertheless seemed friendly, declaring, “I salute the noble government of the United States. I salute the Italians of America, who unite in a single love our two nations.” He was even a good enough sport to get in a good word for Movietone: “This can bring the world together; it
can settle all differences; it can become the international medium, educator and adjuster; it can prevent war.” Other frames showed a “singing and running regiment of Italian soldiers . . . galloping down the great plaza where they drilled,” and on board an Italian cruiser, white-uniformed sailors climbing up to the mizzenmasts. (If Fox couldn’t see the future, neither could American officials: Mussolini’s appearance had been arranged with the help of the former U.S. Ambassador to Italy and on film, the current ambassador introduced him.) Also on the newsreel were segments about the seventy-voice Vatican Choir and a tour of the gardens of St. Peter’s Basilica.
It was a cleverly designed bill of fare. In 1927, New York’s population included nearly four hundred thousand Italian-born immigrants and many others of Italian descent. Fox was aiming, as Variety put it, at “Getting all the barbers in five boroughs to hear Ben Mussolini speak his piece.” Sunrise, Mussolini, and the Vatican Choir—Fox advertised the whole package as “the most important and impressive entertainment ever presented.”
If it seemed odd to pair loud, militaristic images of a Fascist dictator with a sensitive, emotionally intimate work of art, dissonance was exactly the point. Pressed to get his $1.2 million back, Fox had to lure audiences into the theater any way he could. If a patron bought a ticket only to see Mussolini, the money would still count toward Sunrise. So much the better if the two audiences were mutually exclusive—Mussolini fans could fill in the empty seats around the Murnau fans. It wasn’t unreasonable to think that while one group might shake their heads in consternation at the taste of the other, each would be willing to overlook the other to get what it wanted.
On opening night, a capacity crowd filled the Times Square Theater. Fox himself attended, along with various prominent Italian officials, the German consul, and Catholic prelates. Initially, it looked as if Fox’s strategy might work. During its first full week, with two performances daily and tickets priced at $1.00, $2.00, and $2.65, Sunrise reportedly earned an impressive $19,450, and the following week, it took in $16,900.
Reviewers, most of them, swooned. Life magazine’s often crotchety Robert E. Sherwood called Sunrise “the most important picture in the history of the movies” and wrote that it turned the camera into “a sort of first person singular” character that told “a nightmarish tale—fantastic and yet disturbingly real.” New York Times reviewer Mordaunt Hall deemed Murnau “an artist in camera studies, bringing forth marvelous results from lights, shadows and settings” and “a true storyteller.” Across trade publications, which many exhibitors consulted when considering which movies to book in their theaters, the language was equally laudatory.
However, even those who loved the movie questioned its commercial potential. Los Angeles Times critic Norbert Lusk explained the predicament. As “one of the most adult and absorbing pictures that ever came out of Hollywood” and “a brilliant tour de force of directorial genius, of intelligence, imagination and resourcefulness,” Sunrise ran the risk of being labeled a “highbrow picture” that had only limited emotional appeal. The movie’s suspense was intellectual, Lusk wrote, a matter of “wondering what the director will cause his players and camera to do next rather than what the characters will be impelled to do under stress of the situations enmeshing them.” Worrisomely, “it remains a fact that the public weeps and laughs with greater ease when a picture runs in the accustomed grooves,” and “it is doubtful if the mental reactions of the characters in Sunrise will stir audiences to the extent of a tear or a smile.”
By early November 1927, Fox knew the movie was in trouble. At the Times Square Theater, in its seventh week and with prices lowered to $1.00 from $1.65, Sunrise was, according to Variety, “slipping into oblivion,” with weekly receipts of only around $7,000. Fox had been planning imminently to open Sunrise at the Fox-Locust Theatre in the Center City district of Philadelphia; at the last minute, he canceled the booking and left the theater dark for a week before the arrival of Warner Bros.’ The Jazz Singer. He didn’t want to risk the loss. With its relatively small capacity and high operating expenses, the Fox-Locust needed either complete sellouts or very high prices to make a profit. The downward drift in New York continued. By early December 1927, Variety reported, the studio was “giving [Sunrise] tickets away by the handfuls.”
Still, Fox kept Sunrise at the Times Square Theater for twenty-eight weeks, until April 8, 1928, at a total estimated weekly cost of $10,000. In preparation for the Los Angeles premiere on November 29, 1927, at the opulent new Carthay Circle Theatre, the studio slathered the city with billboards and posters, reportedly more than had ever advertised a movie there before. For further platform engagements, Fox finally sent Sunrise to the Fox-Locust in Philadelphia in January 1928 and, a short time later, to large theaters in Newark and Detroit. Although without the services of publicity hoax master Harry Reichenbach, he was trying to turn Sunrise into another Over the Hill, hoping that by the combined forces of enthusiasm and spending he could compel the public to love a movie that it seemed to want to ignore.
Was Fox also lying about the revenue figures to create an illusion of desirability?
Pete Harrison, publisher of the trade magazine Harrison’s Reports, thought so. Skeptical about all those brazen claims—“the most important money-getter in the history of film theatres,” Fox advertised—Harrison did some investigating. In early March 1928 he reported that Sunrise was being given “a forced run” in New York and was “dying” in Detroit. It was only a five-line item in the middle of a column on a back page, but it may have hit too close to the truth to be tolerated. Fox Film’s affable general sales manager Jimmy Grainger invited Harrison to his office—he was sure Harrison would want to “correct . . . an injustice”—and showed him healthy-looking figures from the Sunrise engagements in New York, Detroit, and Newark.
Harrison almost believed Grainger. After all, he liked Sunrise and, in his review, had called it “a marvelous production . . . a revelation of deep psychology to the highest degree.” Then he did more asking around. Consistent with Variety’s finding, he learned that Sunrise had not, as Grainger claimed, taken in a weekly average of $7,500 to $8,000 during its twenty-eight-week run at New York’s Times Square Theater, but only $4,500 to $5,000. In Detroit, where Grainger had said the movie did $10,000 in business in its fourth week, Harrison wrote that “$5,300 is the correct figure.” As for an alleged $20,000 during Sunrise’s first week at Newark’s Terminal Theatre, that simply wasn’t believable. The place was “a dump.” Although Harrison had no independent figures for the Terminal, he sent his secretary there on the afternoon of the opening day of the fifth week, a Sunday. Between 2:30 and 4:00 p.m., she saw about fifty people downstairs and couldn’t tell how many were in the balcony. When she left at four, two other people came out with her. Harrison decided to stick with his original conclusion: Fox Film was padding revenue figures to disguise the fact that Sunrise was “too gruesome for the average picture-goer.” If the studio wanted to persuade him otherwise, Harrison wrote, “Let Jimmy Grainger show me the daily box-office statements, signed by the treasurer of the Times Square Theatre and countersigned by the Fox representative, as well as the bank book showing the daily deposits.” Grainger didn’t.
This came as no surprise. Harrison commented, “Jimmy Grainger is working for the Fox Film Corporation and must necessarily do all he can to show results at the Fox box office.”
In the absence of surviving official records, it’s impossible to tell who was right or how Sunrise fared subsequently when it went into wide release in the fall of 1928. Scattered facts point to gloom. The movie played in only half the industry’s twelve key cities: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago, and Minneapolis. In the heartland, it caused confusion. Pity the poor owners of the State Theatre in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, who, based on glowing news from New York, booked Sunrise as a benefit event for the local Girl Scouts. Patrons created such an uproar upon discovering that the movie was about a husband who wants to
murder his wife so he can run away with another woman that the theater owners published a public apology in the local newspaper: “Never in our eight years of operation . . . have we been so humiliated and so completely misled in our selection of a picture.”
After Sunrise disappeared from the market, Fox would never speak of it as a proud accomplishment.
Why did such an artistic masterpiece falter? Film history scholar Janet Bergstrom blames Fox Film’s decision to pair Sunrise with the Mussolini newsreel for the showcase New York engagement. The sensitive work of art and the showy, histrionic dictator were each “oriented toward an entirely different universe of thought and audience address,” with Mussolini’s brassy performance overwhelming the movie and cramping critical praise. “In short, Mussolini and Movietone upstaged Murnau, and shortchanged Sunrise.” Had it been introduced by itself, Bergstrom writes, “Sunrise would have had a much better chance to win its own audience across America on its own terms.”
That was one point of view. Trade publications reported that in the initial weeks, the Mussolini segment seemed to be propping up the movie, doing as Fox intended and depositing in the cash register dollars that otherwise would have stayed in their patrons’ wallets. Pete Harrison of Harrison’s Reports, who investigated Sunrise revenues more persistently than any other reporter, believed that Mussolini boosted the movie’s weekly revenues at least threefold. When all was said and done, he wrote, “But for the Mussolini feature, Sunrise would have died the death of a dog.”
One factor that definitely hobbled Sunrise was the competition. On October 6, 1927, less than two weeks after the Sunrise premiere, Warner Bros. opened The Jazz Singer at the 1,360-seat Warners’ Theatre in New York. Although audible dialogue in The Jazz Singer occurs only twice, each time lasting only a few minutes, with the rest of the characters’ words communicated through standard intertitle cards, Hollywood’s first talking feature film created a sensation. Earning $9,900 in its first two and a half days, The Jazz Singer went on to gross $3.9 million in the United States. Other movies, all silents, that were pulling in large audiences included The Big Parade, which had opened nearly two years before, in November 1925, Wings, Underworld, The Student Prince, and King of Kings.