Take the good with the bad : Two films with a bit of each

Claude LeLouche's "Roman de Gare" (strangely translated as Cross Tracks) is a pretty good mystery-entertainment, if you can suspend disbelief and just submit yourself for 90 minutes to the wild improbabilities of the plot. (Spoilers coming...) Story involves a guy heading south through France, picks up a woman after witnessing her violent fight with her fiance, she asks if he'll come to her parents' home and pretend to be the finace (whom they haven't met, obviously); he tells her he's a ghost writer for a famous novelist, and will work this into the next novel. The trick of the film is that for a long time we're not sure if that's the truth or if in fact he's either a., an escaped child molester (about whom we hear radio reports) or b. a teacher who's abandoned his family (we cross-cut to scenes of the teacher's wife). There's no reason we'd think that if LeLouche had not planted ridiculously misleading clues: e.g., both the escaped prisoner and the driver perform magic tricks for children. Total red herring, as it turns out. In the end, we think the driver's been murdered at sea, but he turns up later to get his rightful claim as the true author. Fully preposterous, but kind of fun nevertheless.

Also watched the last 30 minutes or so of Murnau's 1927 silent "Sunrise," a classic, which is both good and bad. Honestly, does anyone other than a cineaste still watch silents? The idiotic plots, the horrible acting with the stabbing gestures and the popout eyes? On one level, the movie was ridiculous. And yet - the photography was, by any standard, today as much as 1927 or even more, stupendous. One beautiful scene or image after another - especially sailing peacefully across the see (waving to a passing riverboat), the search at night for the woman's body in the water, with the searchboats holding lanterns, the family and neighbors gathered in the rude home on the seacoast, the men with the scruffy beards, the light from the left - looked like a Rembrandt painting. For these scenes alone, Sunrise is worth watching.