The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (296 page)

On
The English Patient
(96, Anthony Minghella), one of the most densely textured of films, he did the editing and sound and won Oscars for both. He was responsible for the reconstruction of Orson Welles’s
Touch of Evil
. He did editing and sound on
The Talented Mr. Ripley
(99, Minghella). And he did the detailed work on
Apocalypse Now Redux
(01, Coppola).

He was in charge of editing and sound on
K-19: The Widowmaker
(02, Kathryn Bigelow), and he next edited
Cold Mountain
(03, Minghella). Rather more usefully, 2002 saw the publication of
The Conversations
, an excellent inquiry into film between Murch and Michael Ondaatje, the author of
The English Patient
. He did sound and editing on
Jarhead
(05, Sam Mendes) before being reunited with Francis Coppola on two personal projects,
Youth Without Youth
(07) and
Tetro
(2009).

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
(F. W. Plumpe) (1888–1931), b. Bielefeld, Westphalia
1919:
Der Knabe in Blau; Satanas
. 1920:
Sehnsucht; Der Januskopf; Abend … Nacht … Morgen; Der Gang in die Nacht; Der Bucklige und die Tänzerin
. 1921:
Marizza, Gennant die Schmugglermadonna; Schloss Vogelöd
. 1922:
Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens; Der Brennende Acker; Phantom
. 1923:
Die Austreibung; Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs
. 1924:
Der Letzte Mann/The Last Laugh
. 1925:
Tartüff
. 1926:
Faust
. 1927:
Sunrise
. 1929:
Four Devils
. 1930:
Our Daily Bread/City Girl; Die Zwolfte Stunde
(sound version of
Nosferatu
). 1931:
Tabu
(codirected with Robert Flaherty).

It was in 1964 that Lotte Eisner’s study of Murnau was published in France. Reviewing it, David Robinson argued that its timing was significant, presumably because it confronted English audiences with the issue of Murnau’s greatness. But Lotte Eisner’s obscure book remained untranslated until 1973 and Murnau was still far short of his proper recognition in Britain and America. Even today, with more of the early films available, and the America achievement clearer, Murnau is a neglected master.

But he does not lend himself easily to massive interpretation.
Nosferatu
can be shunted off into the horror genre, along with
Faust. The Last Laugh
can be seen as a contribution to German Expressionism.
Sunrise
is certainly a major example of the women’s picture.
Tabu
does abandon the sort of literal authenticity that preoccupied Flaherty. There are no persistent thematic or literary bonds to tie Murnau’s straggling work together. Our notion of the film director is of a grandiose self-publicist, partly because the movie industry has always lived by those inflated terms. But Murnau never adhered to that pattern. Tentativeness was one of the keys to his life and work, and it cuts right across the grain of the world in which he worked.

Expressionism, after all, is based on a near-clinical certainty about states of mind, taken to the point where they invade and distort external reality. Although it is often called a morbid and hysterical genre, it is still marked by dogmatic German self-confidence and a rigid sense of narrative structure and moral values. There is ambiguity in
Caligari
, but it is far from clear that it was intended. Even in Lang, the unease that arises from
Metropolis
or
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
is part of a fixed imaginative anticipation of malign fate. It is only in America, in
Fury
, that Lang grasps the role of free will. In general, German films of the 1920s suffer from the thoroughness with which they are conceived and controlled. It is a composed and designed cinema, always concentrating on angles, objects, or faces, certain that a whole world can be based on them. Whatever the emotional or the intellectual undercurrents of German cinema, it is conclusive in its faith that images prove ideas and that messages can be easily digested from films.

Murnau, by contrast, is much less sure of the message.
The Last Laugh
is the least interesting of his better-known films because it is most affected by the German belief in narrative finality: the idea of a proud commissionaire reduced to a lavatory attendant has all the banal simplicity of a clever short story. The film would be maudlin and trite if that were its only subject. But the obviousness of the story, plus the potent sentimentality of Emil Jannings in the central part, are partially reduced by Murnau’s cinematic creation of a world that is not only representational, but in which the real and the created are subtly merged. His films are about individual melodrama prompted by the pressure of the world. And Murnau’s greatness lies in this realization—that it is possible to photograph the real world and yet invest it with a variety of poetic, imaginative, and subjective qualities. The camera itself allowed audiences to experience actuality and imagination simultaneously.

Of course, Murnau often used sets.
The Last Laugh
is a studio film, as is
Sunrise
. What distinguished Murnau from other Expressionists busy building their worlds on sets is that he made his camera move. It moves elsewhere, but implacably in Lang and decoratively in Dupont. As soon as a film builds sets, the camera movements become preconceived and measured. When a wall stops, so must a tracking shot: the shooting script envisages setting and movement simultaneously. But Murnau’s camera moved to suggest spatial actuality and to implicate a world outside the frame. In Expressionism proper, the world stops at the frame, but Murnau’s emphasis on physical movement meant that the unseen was constantly being implied. As Gilberto Perez Guillermo has said:

Murnau’s cinema … is primarily a cinema of empty space … space becomes the central object: the space traversed during the trolley ride in
Sunrise
, immeasurably more expressive than any of the individual objects passed; the space surrounding the lovers’ hut in
Tabu
, charged with the menace of a hostile world.… Like Velazquez, Murnau looks past the foreground and into the background. Attention is not restricted to a sharply delimited object standing in the foreground, or even to a number of significant objects strategically placed within the frame. It is dispersed throughout the whole, throughout space; and space, fluid in nature and not likely to be contained within sharp limits, palpably extends all around the frame of the film. Murnau’s compositions, his shots of details, have a certain imbalance, a deliberate incompleteness which relates them inextricably to the world around them.

That deliberate incompleteness is the source of the highest cinematic beauty: not the ornate compositional elegance of Eisenstein, Lang, or even Hitchcock, but the dynamic visual sense that Stroheim had and that runs through Sternberg, Renoir, Ophüls, Welles, and Mizoguchi. It is very close to Astruc’s theory of
la caméra stylo
, and there is an eerie prediction of subsequent critical pronouncements in this quote from Murnau: “The camera is the director’s pencil. It should have the greatest possible mobility in order to record the most fleeting harmony of atmosphere. It is important that the mechanical factor should not stand between the spectator and the film.”

The “mechanical” was always likely to obtrude in Germany if only because the German view of cinema was schematic. I think it likely that Murnau never found a subject he liked in Germany.
The Last Laugh
is a film working against its own limits and finally made absurd by the tacked-on happy ending. Even the extraordinary naturalism of
Nosferatu
is impeded by having its origins in Bram Stoker’s essentially unenterprising
Dracula
. It is poetic, subtle, and marvelously employs real locations to suggest the atmosphere of plague and menace. But Murnau’s art transcends genre, and he is ultimately wasting himself on so direct a horror picture. In the same way, he was not able to overcome the picturesque elements of costume in
Tartüff
or the supernatural in
Faust
.

It was in America that he felt liberated. (Incidentally, Lotte Eisner has shown how far Murnau’s homosexuality was inhibited by the German criminal code.) Much of
Sunrise
was shot in the studio, with whatever artifice was necessary. It was also a strange combination of American material and German talents. As well as scriptwriter Carl Mayer, Murnau had Rochus Gliese and Edgar Ulmer as art directors and Karl Struss assisting Charles Rosher with the photography. What freed him was the opportunity to use sunlit locations, the spontaneity of Janet Gaynor and George O’Brien, the American optimism of the story, and the American cinema’s aptitude for casualness. For Murnau’s own shyness and pessimism are made to illuminate the raw cheerfulness of America.
Sunrise
is a great film; a landmark in the use of a moving camera; and of crucial importance in showing how genre cinema may be complemented by the gravity of a true artist’s feelings.
Sunrise
is a world of art made out of a novelette, as are
Shanghai Express, The Mortal Storm, The Shop Around the Corner, Letter From an Unknown Woman, Imitation of Life, A Star Is Born
, and
Daisy Kenyon
.

Murnau flopped with
Sunrise
—years ahead of its time—and with
Four Devils
. The last of his three films at Fox,
Our Daily Bread
, was begun on location in Oregon, but the studio lost its nerve and Murnau was replaced by hacks. In reaction, he and Flaherty went off to the South Seas to make
Tabu
. It is bad Flaherty in the sense that it barely bothers to deal with the natives anthropologically. But it is a great work of art that uses the natives as Everyman figures. What Grierson took for the fake glamour of Hollywood, turning indigenous peoples into stars, is really the beautiful depiction of a doomed love story. As in
Sunrise
, Murnau fused locations and the finest studio lighting to make a reinvention of reality.
Tabu
and
Sunrise
are masterworks. We are lucky that they both survive.

Murnau died in a car accident on the point of taking up a contract with Paramount. Lotte Eisner says that he picked chauffeurs for their looks rather than their driving abilities. If so, that whim deprived us of a great director at a time when he was going to the studio most likely to encourage him.

He was only forty-three when he died, and in
Sunrise
he had already married a German narrative fatalism to the naturalism of actors like Janet Gaynor, George O’Brien, and Margaret Livingstone, who is so poignant as the vamp. Above all, he had found a crucial American subject, the ordinary person’s dream of something more than fate has allowed, and the dread that goes with the dream. For
Sunrise
is a key step toward film noir as well as the woman’s picture. It is the city and the country, jazzy futures and the old frontier. Murnau might have done more for American film than Lang or Lubitsch.

Audie Murphy
(1924–71), b. Kingston, Texas
It was all very well for Murphy to be America’s most decorated soldier of the Second World War, the slayer of some 240 Germans, and the holder of the Congressional Medal of Honor, but on the screen his baby face seemed unconvincing in action and unhappy when called upon to speak. He was a sharecropper when he came out of the army and a clerk and garage attendant before his Hollywood debut in
Beyond Glory
(48, John Farrow).

John Huston made the first serious attempt to carry Murphy’s real-life experiences over to the screen when he cast him as the Young Soldier in
The Red Badge of Courage
(51). It was one of Huston’s whimsical insights to notice that this young veteran could look a novice amid the poetic bat-tlescapes intended for that film. To judge by Lillian Ross’s
Picture
, Murphy was bewildered by the project, but he does not let the film down and conveys the epic simplicity of Stephen Crane’s novel.

Murphy was much closer to the glamorous infantryman playing himself in
To Hell and Back
(55, Jesse Hibbs). He never claimed to be an actor, and it is a mystery that he was called upon to play
The Quiet American
(58) by Joseph Mankiewicz. Apart from this, he made a herd of second-feature Westerns:
Sierra
(50, Alfred E. Green);
Kansas Raiders
(50, Ray Enright);
The Kid from Texas
(50, Kurt Neumann);
The Cimarron Kid
(51, Budd Boetticher);
Duel at Silver Creek
(52, Don Siegel);
Ride Clear of Diablo
(54, Hibbs);
Destry
(54, George Marshall);
Night Passage
(57, James Neilson); as the Harry Morgan figure in
The Gun Runners
(58, Siegel), a version of Hemingway’s
To Have and Have Not;
and
No
Name on the Bullet
(59, Jack Arnold). His only other big picture was
The Unforgiven
(60, Huston), an old horse whistled back from the meadow by a kind master.

In the late 1960s, fatter but still boyish, Murphy mixed Lyles Westerns and
A Time for Dying
(69, Boetticher) with acting as a private policeman against drug-runners and the Mafia. The onetime hero was acquitted on a charge of attempted murder after beating up a man. He died in a private plane crash in Virginia.

Eddie Murphy
(Ed ward Regan Murphy), b. Bushwick, New York, 1961
However much one appreciates Spike Lee’s
Malcolm X
, its steadfast length never quite conveys the turbulent, contradictory passions evident in one of Eddie Murphy’s savage smiles. Should he entertain us, or kill us? Is there some compromise response more useful to him than taking our money? Here are two remarks that ride on Murphy’s tense smiles:
The first is from Ned Tanen, production chief at Paramount in the years when Eddie Murphy was so important that he sometimes treated the studio the way gangsters loom over double-crossers: He has