The (unnamed) Woman from the City (Margaret Livingston) is the main antagonist of the 1927 silent film Sunrise. She's a city vamp who uses her good looks to attract men.
Role[]
She's introduced into the story, as a urban vamp who's holidaying in the country from the metropolis. The vamp has rented a room in one of the country houses. In her simple rustic room, she dances in and lights her cigarette at a burning candle, and then changes into a slinky black dress with shiny high-heeled shoes and stockings. She forces the elderly peasant woman in her quarters to clean her shoes with a cloth. She walks down the village road to the outside of one of the farmhouses where she voyeuristically spies a lighted window. There, she signals with a soft, clandestine whistle and summons a fallen, married country Man. Undecisive and hesitant for a while, he finally gestures to her from the window that he will meet her, and without a word to his light-haired Wife, he leaves without touching his dinner that is being set on the table. This has been a frequent occurrence - his angelic wife sinks into a chair with a gloomy and embittered look.
In the darkness of midnight under a gigantic full moon which reflects on the water and shines through the haze, the dazed, guilt-ridden but bewitched husband is in sexual thrall to the passionate city woman. He stealthily trudges from his home to secretly meet and conspire with his tempting mistress on the edge of the misty, moonlit marshes.
A dark figure waiting for the man and silhouetted against the moon. She twirls a flower in her hand and then tosses it away. The temptress primps in a mirror held in her purse and applies make-up. After he appears, the supernatural spell and erotic charm of the city woman seduces him and he pulls her into his arms for a passionate, fervent kiss - she steals his sanity and soul as she literally pulls him down into the swamp. While being kissed as they lie on the grass, the seductress tempts him, and offers the man an opportunity to move to the city with her, but when he asked about the wife, she suggested drowning her. This fills the man's mind with terrible and seductive images. At first, he is horrified by the idea, but the woman stated it would look like an accident. Then the man responded by strangling her, shaking her, and pushing her away. But the vamp eventually overpowers him with kisses and he succumbs and continues to temp the man into coming to the city with her.
The city woman gathers some bulrushes in her hand and outlines that the man should use them to hold himself up, and save himself while the wife was drowning.
But on the day of the plan, when the man and the wife were rowing across the water, the man suddenly grew second thoughts about drowning his wife, and was unable to go through the plan. He spares his wife, but the wife is still reasonably scared from nearly being drowned.
Then later midway through the film, when the man and his wife were out of the country on their honeymoon, and she was plotting to take the farmer's money. While enveloped with cigarette smoke, she circles a newspaper advertisement for the purchase of farm land.
When the man and the wife were returning from their honeymoon, the two of them got caught in a thunderstorm. The man managed to make it back onto land, but his wife was seemingly lost in the storm, leaving the man tragically calling out for his wife.
The city woman awakens and watches from a distance, thinking that the murder plan has successfully been carried out. She removes her thin negligee and dresses into heavier clothes to watch the rescue effort from a closer distance. A search party is assembled - they search in boats with lamplights for the missing woman. From a fork in a tree, the vamp watches what she believes is the convincing act of the Man distraught with grief. The half-mad husband searches for his wife at the bow of the first boat with a lantern extended out in his hand. In a stationary frame, the wife is pictured floating unconscious in the water - she floats into and then out of the picture (from the top left to bottom right) on the bulrushes. Again, the French horns simulate the husband's desperate calls for his wife.
Some of the bulrushes are found scattered on the water, entangled with remnants of her scarf. She is presumed drowned when there is no sign of her. The dazed husband collapses in the boat, is comforted and then led back to his farmhouse by neighbors. When he looks down at his wife's empty bed and falls weeping to his knees, the room is streaked with somber shadows. Church bells ring just before the seductive city woman approaches him in the night and signals him with a whistle. She assumes that his emotional reaction is part of the deception, but in a sudden fury, the husband rages at her in frustration - appearing like a crazed Frankenstein monster. He pursues her - attacking and strangling her over a fence in his despair.
Just as he is about to kill her, he hears a happy outcry from his mother (signaled again by French horns) announcing that his wife has been found - unconscious but alive. He releases his strangling grip around the vamp's neck and rushes to his wife's bedside and they are joyously reunited. She opens her eyes and smiles at him with an angelic face.
The next morning, as the sun rises, the spurned city mistress decided to leave the country and return back to the metropolis in a horse-drawn carriage.