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The plot of this film is typical of nineteenth-century domestic melodrama, involving the temptations held out to a young farmer, living happily with his wife and child, by a city vamp, who consumes his small financial resources and finally suggests murdering his wife. The iconography of the domestic drama is everywhere. This iconography contributes to the extreme polarities between which the man is pulled, and which are intensified by non - individualisation of the protagonists, designated only as the man, the wife and the woman from the city.
While much of the film's iconography, melodramatic structure and mise en scène looks back to nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, it also looks forward in style to the full development of cinematic melodrama. Notable in this respect is, first, the influence of German Expressionism that Murnau brings to Hollywood, particularly in the distorted perspectives of the interior sets, the stereotyping of the woman from the city, the dramatisation of typography in the intertitles that spell out the murder plot, the split screen, superimpositions and dissolves that link the woman and the city; second, Murnau's development of the moving camera (for instance, to bring the young farmer to the city woman on the marshes) and the long-take, deep-focus tracking shot that allows us to travel with the young couple on the trolley from lakeside to city are part of the externalisation of emotion into cinematic mise en scène as the hallmark of full-blown Hollywood melodrama in the 1940s and 1950s.
Finally, the film's use of sound marks its transitional status. For while it utilises a synchronous soundtrack, it fulfils the nineteenth-century melodramatic ideal of reducing dialogue in favour of music and pictorial mise en scène, adding only a few expressive sound effects.
— Christine Gledhill
While much of the film's iconography, melodramatic structure and mise en scène looks back to nineteenth-century theatrical melodrama, it also looks forward in style to the full development of cinematic melodrama. Notable in this respect is, first, the influence of German Expressionism that Murnau brings to Hollywood, particularly in the distorted perspectives of the interior sets, the stereotyping of the woman from the city, the dramatisation of typography in the intertitles that spell out the murder plot, the split screen, superimpositions and dissolves that link the woman and the city; second, Murnau's development of the moving camera (for instance, to bring the young farmer to the city woman on the marshes) and the long-take, deep-focus tracking shot that allows us to travel with the young couple on the trolley from lakeside to city are part of the externalisation of emotion into cinematic mise en scène as the hallmark of full-blown Hollywood melodrama in the 1940s and 1950s.
Finally, the film's use of sound marks its transitional status. For while it utilises a synchronous soundtrack, it fulfils the nineteenth-century melodramatic ideal of reducing dialogue in favour of music and pictorial mise en scène, adding only a few expressive sound effects.
— Christine Gledhill