New Pictures: Oct. 3, 1927

Sunrise. In Germany, F. W. Murnau, Ufa director, made The Last Laugh and Faust. Last week at a showing of his first Hollywood film, people looked to him, as usual, to repeat. In Sunrise he has a meagre story of a clod of a farmer who almost drowned his wife before realizing that he loved her. It is based on the story, "A Trip to Tilsit," by the German Hermann Sudermann, and manages to remain picturesquely soporific for a long evening. Janet Gaynor (seen in Seventh Heaven) contributes a pathetic beauty to the role of the girl-wife. The Student Prince has had other incarnations. First it was the play Old Heidelberg, in which Richard Mansfield appeared; then an operetta, produced by the Shuberts. Now it is a film in which Ramon Novarro and Norma Shearer are directed by Ernst Lubitsch, whom most people recognize as the foremost master of cinema comedy and point to as a particularly baffling example of how a man can be light and Teutonic at the same time. It is the atmosphere of old Heidelberg that interests him mainly. The story is spread thin—being nothing more unusual than the one about the princeling who went to college and fell in love with the barmaid. But the beer-quaffing, the jolly good-fellowship and the intrusion at odd moments of the ridiculous pomposities that beset princes of every romance, are the details that Director Lubitsch loves to fondle and set forth. In the end the prince returns to marry a very unattractive body with a long title. The little maid turns sadly away to face what seems to mean a career as "college widow." But the film is never allowed to be as sad as it is merry.