12.15.08
Murnau and Borzaga’s Early Sound Works for Fox
Holy crap.
Normally those really spendy, over-extravagant DVD box sets just kinda piss me off. But Fox Studio Classics has just released one that I might just feel compelled to actually splurge on. (It’s also kind of a toing, because just two nights ago I spontaneously decided to watch Sunrise on DVD and meandered through the extras.)
As you can see above, Murnau, Borzage and Fox is a ginormous, 12-DVD dee-luxe $et ($240 SRP, $180 on Amazon — ouch) with not one but two hefty books of essays and photos, and a new 2 hour documentary about the directors. Mmokay. But the real grabber is the list of films — 2 by Murnau and 10 by Borzage, spanning 1925-1932, the late silent through the early sound/talkie era.  A couple are acknowledged masterpieces, several are highly respected, and most-all of them have long been unavailable on any kind of decent home video. Martin Scorsese, in his BFI documentary for British television, A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), singled out Borzage as one of the best Hollywood directors of the early sound period, not only making intelligent films but occasionally pushing the severely limited technical capabilities of the time, especially with camera work. I’ve been intending to delve into his stuff for a while now.
The two Murnau gems are noteworthy. The Sunrise disc includes two versions of the film: the Movietone version, as well as the European silent version. This is important, because the silent version was not only a somewhat different cut, it used negative from a different camera (and thus slightly different angles), and sometimes different takes. Also, the infant sound-on-film format used a fairly wide area of the available film for the actual sound, slightly reducing the horizontal space available for the image. The silent film negatives had a different aspect ratio. The DVD released a couple-few years ago (as part of a different box set) included only the Movietone version. If the official PR is to be believed, the Movietone version on this new disc has a 1:30 aspect ratio, and the Euro silent one is in 1:20.
I’m also happy to see City Girl (1930, with a 1:19 aspect ratio, thanks for asking) is included. Originally titled Our Daily Bread, Fox took control of it away from Murnau and re-edited it somewhat. He left the studio very soon after. Murnau’s original cut is, of course, lost so I’ve wanted to see the surviving version.
Dave Kehr recently gave this set a learned and positively elegiac review in the New York Times in “When Titans Roamed the Backlot at Fox” (Dec. 8, 2008):Â “Altogether, Murnau, Borzage and Fox represents the best that home video has to offer in quality, scholarship and enduring aesthetic interest; this is not a set that anyone will exhaust soon.”
Anyway, here’s the list, not including the scads of extras, commentaries, outtakes, mini-docs, and all that…
Murnau silents:
Sunrise (1927) (Movietone score version and European silent version)
The City Girl (1930)
Borzage silents:
Lazybones (1925)
Seventh Heaven (1928)
Street Angel (1928)
Lucky Star (1929)
Borzage talkies:
They Had to See Paris (1929)
Liliom (1930)
Song O’ My Heart (1930) (full sound version and music/effects version)
Bad Girl (1931)
After Tomorrow (1932)
Young America (1932)
(Thanks to the Bioscope blog’s post for the tip-off.)
