City Girl

F. W. Murnau’s next-to-last film, produced under the title Our Daily Bread, was cut and reshot as a part-talkie for its 1930 release. Until the late 1960s, it was considered a lost film, but when it was found, film scholars were amazed to discover not a mutilated version but Murnau’s complete silent version. The ambitious filmmaker actually bought an Oregon farm on which to film this story of a wheat grower’s son (Charles Farrell) who meets a city waitress (Mary Duncan) and brings her back to the farm, only to have her abused by his father. As in Sunrise, Murnau’s pièce de résistance is his depiction of the city through the eyes of the innocent farm boy and his slightly more sophisticated wife. On the film’s rediscovery, the British Film Institute’s John Gillett wrote, “It reveals new facets of Murnau’s magisterial style.”