City Girl

Lem brings a Chicago waitress home to his father's wheat farm in Minnesota, the father treats her as a bought woman, and the hired harvest crew treats her worse. The run through the wheat, the camera going with the two of them, is the freest thing in Murnau's American work, and the storm and the harvest at the end are staged as weather rather than spectacle. He shot on a working farm; Fox added talking sequences and cut the film after he left, and the silent version, which is the one here, survived. Mary Duncan, Charles Farrell, David Torrence. Begun as Our Daily Bread, 1930.