Lonesome
Director Paul Fejos was also a medical doctor, novelist, playwright and anthropological filmmaker. Throughout his career he made films in his native Hungary and in Europe and America. Fejos' marvelous Hollywood films of the late silent era were all but forgotten in the novelty of sound. (Many, like Lonesome, were released both as silents and as “part-talkies.”) But these films, beginning with The Last Moment in 1928, represent the height of the American silent film, when it was at its most accomplished in terms of narrative, and visually, at its most poetic. Lonesome, also made in 1928, is considered Fejos' masterpiece. The tale of a young telephone operator, Mary, who meets a factory worker, John, loses him in the urban crowd and finds him again is typical of Fejos' profound simplicity; his vision of loneliness in urban America has affinities with F. W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927) and King Vidor's The Crowd (1928). Fejos anticipates much later cinematic developments in his use of handheld camera and breathtakingly mobile location shooting.