A delightful, sweet-natured Hollywood romance, clearly influenced
by Murnau's Sunrise in its visual lyricism and its use of the moving
camera. The fragile love story is beautifully offset by the bustling
anonymity of urban crowd scenes, and rapid inter-cutting is expertly
used both to stress the mechanisation of city life and to show the links
between characters who will finally fall for each other. The film's
conventions are of course stylised, but it also displays a charmingly
offhand eye for realistic detail. The print under review is the silent
version, without intrusive talkie sequences later tacked on by the
studio; in this version it's a small gem, but a flawless one.
