...but got progressively cut down into a personal story of a city girl's problems with a hostile-seeming environment. Retitled City Girl, it was roughly edited with some talkie scenes to cash in on the new craze. Finally, though the silent version of the film contains some of the director's finest work, this was hardly noticed in the confusion of the talkies and his Hollywood career ended.

Paradise Lost
He did however manage to make one more film: the privately financed and evidently non-commercial Tabu (1930), begun in collaboration with the documentary film maker Robert Flaherty and intended as a semi-documentary, was filmed entirely in South Sea locations with a non-professional cast of Polynesians. Lacking the documentarist's ideals, Murnau insisted on making it into a rhapsody on the theme of fated young love, as elaborately structured as any of his studio pictures. The result was a perfect swansong for the director - a hymn of natural beauty, of people and of landscape, and a triumph of aesthetic cinema. But it did not open until a few days after his death, and what else he would have done in Europe or America remains one of the cinema's most intriguing fields of speculation.

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1931 Tabu