Sun Nov 30, 2008 8:20 pm
(Adapted from old AMS posts. Note: this has lots of spoilers for the titles listed above, so don't read it if you want to see them fresh.)
Seventh Heaven is somewhere in the middle of the pack of silent films that are still seen today, but in its day it was a huge success, and it's no mystery why. With World War I less than a decade behind it, Seventh Heaven (1927) offered shameless fulfillment of one of the most persistent fantasies of the war-- that your loved one, believed dead, will rise and come back to you if you just wish for it with all your heart.
The film is mainly remembered as a proletarian Parisian romance between the sewer-worker Chico (Charles Farrell) and the waif Diane (Janet Gaynor), set on a visually active representation of a Paris neighborhood in which the stars and the camera are always roaming over stairs and rooftops, but the last act and climax are driven by the war and by Diane's wishing that her beloved will come back to her which, struggling against great odds (including having been blinded), he does in a scene of sentimentality rendered with the kind of no-holds-barred brio that only the silent cinema, with its booming organs and dreamlike absorption, could achieve.
Its success prompted immediate imitators (the 1928 Colleen Moore vehicle Lilac Time, for instance, follows its template closely) but more importantly, it produced the desire to reunite stars Farrell and Gaynor in similar vehicles under the direction of Frank Borzage. Two would follow for the stars (before Sunny Side Up, their first talkie, felt the need to promise something different in its ads), though for Borzage, Seventh Heaven had more lasting impact-- he would explore the theme of rapturous romance among the lower classes in several of his 30s films (Man's Castle, History Is Made at Night, etc.), and portray the collision of war with young love in others, most notably the earliest Hollywood films to deal with the rising Nazi menace (a theme Borzage had nearly to himself during the 30s), Little Man, What Now, Three Comrades, and The Mortal Storm.
Street Angel (1928) has been a familiar title, if somewhat rarely seen, because it joined Seventh Heaven and Sunrise as one of the three films cited in Janet Gaynor's win of the first Best Actress Oscar. (As you no doubt know, for the first few years of the Oscars, the award was given to a performer generally, not for a specific performance, and then all of their work during the period was listed with the award.) Gaynor plays another waif driven, in desperation, to prostitution (quite frankly portrayed); arrested for theft while soliciting before she actually has to do anything, she escapes with a circus, meets painter Farrell, they fall rapturously in love-- and then that policeman remembers where he's seen her. She goes away in secret rather than let Farrell know her shame, but alas, he turns to drink in disappointment at the perfidy of women, and in the big climax, it is not that he must crawl back to her from the dead, but that she must convince him of her purity before he (understandably-- to the movie) strangles her. In a church.
Using a similar moving camera on a stage set-like cityscape, but with lighting far more influenced by German Expressionism than Seventh Heaven (the result of following Sunrise in production at Fox, no doubt), Street Angel is visually impressive but the plot, and the attitudes that underlie it, are repugnant-- it's one thing for a young couple to be torn apart by war, it's another to be torn apart by your own sanctimony. And part of the reason we may find it unappealing is because we're not swept away by Farrell's character in this tale-- it's the kind of role that, if it didn't kill his career outright, certainly helped type him as a relic of the more florid silent era as sound progressed.
One of the truisms of movies is that men happily in love are unwatchable dopes. Happy couples are in general undramatic, to be interesting there needs to be some form of conflict before you find happiness in the fadeout (your two families are feuding; you're fighting like cats and dogs on the Twentieth Century; your elderly father has hired a private detective to keep you and your sister out of trouble). But the man in particular stands a high chance of looking like a big emasculated idiot if he just spends the movie gooning at his gal.
Borzage's Man's Castle (1932) shows how to do this right-- Spencer Tracy does manly stuff out in the world to try to get by, while Loretta Young tries to make them a happy home on no money. Street Angel does it all wrong-- Farrell, who has a strapping physique and handsome face but a little pursed mouth, just stares and moons at Gaynor like a lovesick beagle, which means we already can't stand him by the time he turns out to be a moralistic jerk-slash-pretentious-artiste. (It doesn't help that the early soundtrack breaks into either whistling or saccharine serenading on a regular basis. I guess we can be grateful that no one yodels.)
Street Angel was a success but Lucky Star (1929), which was lost until c. 1990 and then rediscovered fairly rapturously, has the feel of a chastened attempt to return to a more faithful rendition of a popular formula (or two). Again, the thing that will come between a young couple is not merely their own attitudes, but war; the setting, however, is not the proles' Paris but a rural hamlet out of a Griffith film or Tol'able David. The mistake of making Farrell a layabout artist is reversed as firmly as could be imagined-- he's not only a rugged pole-climber for the electric company, but in the opening scene winds up trading punches with his boss at the top of the pole! In the war he loses the ability to walk, and back home in a wheelchair he forms a friendship with young Gaynor, who's good-hearted white trash. But her harridan mom has eyes set on Farrell's old boss, a scoundrel and a rake in his Army uniform who, however, looks to be prosperous and, most importantly, has two working legs.
Again the movie does Farrell few favors by reducing him to an emasculated role-- rather too much of the middle section has him offering Gaynor grooming tips and shampooing her hair, which ain't exactly how Clark Gable made it big. But it works at least as the low point from which Farrell's character will rebound when, like the shill for a faith healer, he rises from that wheelchair and heroically makes his way on two legs and crutches to save her from the scoundrel and, just as importantly, fulfill another wish of everyone in the audience who had a family member return damaged by the war. The old Seventh Heaven formula works one last time in a rousing conclusion to the silent era for the stars and the director who made them indelible. (Gaynor had one more silent to go, but we'll let that pass.)
Visually, Lucky Star survives in a much better copy than Street Angel, the UCLA restoration of which was extremely grainy (16mm blowup?), and so the real pleasure of the film is less the story, though its emotional impact is real, than Borzage's presentation of it in gauzy, shimmery late silent Poetic-o-Vision. The sets-- which may have recycled some of Sunrise's, though they're shot quite differently-- have a kind of heightened reality, presenting multiple planes on which action may take place (a house might be in the middle, for instance, but a road will wrap around front and back so that we might see action taking place either right in front of us, or up on the road behind the house. It's not exactly stage-like, but certainly not realistic either; maybe the best analogy is to something like the entire fantasy town constructed for Robert Altman's Popeye, which allowed his improvisational camera to poke around at will (unlike the sets in so many fantasy films, e.g. a Batman movie, which are clearly just what the storyboard shows for that shot and no more).
Borzage's camerawork is not improvisational, it's clearly planned, but it's also just as clear that the whole environment is quite solid and detailed, and this sort of dreamlike vividness makes Lucky Star one of that group of utterly accomplished and visually masterful late silents that show us everything that was about to be lost forever with the transition to sound. Indeed, in Lucky Star's case even that final testament to silence was lost for 60 years-- until, like Chico in Seventh Heaven, against all odds it made its way back from the land of the dead.
Seventh Heaven is somewhere in the middle of the pack of silent films that are still seen today, but in its day it was a huge success, and it's no mystery why. With World War I less than a decade behind it, Seventh Heaven (1927) offered shameless fulfillment of one of the most persistent fantasies of the war-- that your loved one, believed dead, will rise and come back to you if you just wish for it with all your heart.
The film is mainly remembered as a proletarian Parisian romance between the sewer-worker Chico (Charles Farrell) and the waif Diane (Janet Gaynor), set on a visually active representation of a Paris neighborhood in which the stars and the camera are always roaming over stairs and rooftops, but the last act and climax are driven by the war and by Diane's wishing that her beloved will come back to her which, struggling against great odds (including having been blinded), he does in a scene of sentimentality rendered with the kind of no-holds-barred brio that only the silent cinema, with its booming organs and dreamlike absorption, could achieve.
Its success prompted immediate imitators (the 1928 Colleen Moore vehicle Lilac Time, for instance, follows its template closely) but more importantly, it produced the desire to reunite stars Farrell and Gaynor in similar vehicles under the direction of Frank Borzage. Two would follow for the stars (before Sunny Side Up, their first talkie, felt the need to promise something different in its ads), though for Borzage, Seventh Heaven had more lasting impact-- he would explore the theme of rapturous romance among the lower classes in several of his 30s films (Man's Castle, History Is Made at Night, etc.), and portray the collision of war with young love in others, most notably the earliest Hollywood films to deal with the rising Nazi menace (a theme Borzage had nearly to himself during the 30s), Little Man, What Now, Three Comrades, and The Mortal Storm.
Street Angel (1928) has been a familiar title, if somewhat rarely seen, because it joined Seventh Heaven and Sunrise as one of the three films cited in Janet Gaynor's win of the first Best Actress Oscar. (As you no doubt know, for the first few years of the Oscars, the award was given to a performer generally, not for a specific performance, and then all of their work during the period was listed with the award.) Gaynor plays another waif driven, in desperation, to prostitution (quite frankly portrayed); arrested for theft while soliciting before she actually has to do anything, she escapes with a circus, meets painter Farrell, they fall rapturously in love-- and then that policeman remembers where he's seen her. She goes away in secret rather than let Farrell know her shame, but alas, he turns to drink in disappointment at the perfidy of women, and in the big climax, it is not that he must crawl back to her from the dead, but that she must convince him of her purity before he (understandably-- to the movie) strangles her. In a church.
Using a similar moving camera on a stage set-like cityscape, but with lighting far more influenced by German Expressionism than Seventh Heaven (the result of following Sunrise in production at Fox, no doubt), Street Angel is visually impressive but the plot, and the attitudes that underlie it, are repugnant-- it's one thing for a young couple to be torn apart by war, it's another to be torn apart by your own sanctimony. And part of the reason we may find it unappealing is because we're not swept away by Farrell's character in this tale-- it's the kind of role that, if it didn't kill his career outright, certainly helped type him as a relic of the more florid silent era as sound progressed.
One of the truisms of movies is that men happily in love are unwatchable dopes. Happy couples are in general undramatic, to be interesting there needs to be some form of conflict before you find happiness in the fadeout (your two families are feuding; you're fighting like cats and dogs on the Twentieth Century; your elderly father has hired a private detective to keep you and your sister out of trouble). But the man in particular stands a high chance of looking like a big emasculated idiot if he just spends the movie gooning at his gal.
Borzage's Man's Castle (1932) shows how to do this right-- Spencer Tracy does manly stuff out in the world to try to get by, while Loretta Young tries to make them a happy home on no money. Street Angel does it all wrong-- Farrell, who has a strapping physique and handsome face but a little pursed mouth, just stares and moons at Gaynor like a lovesick beagle, which means we already can't stand him by the time he turns out to be a moralistic jerk-slash-pretentious-artiste. (It doesn't help that the early soundtrack breaks into either whistling or saccharine serenading on a regular basis. I guess we can be grateful that no one yodels.)
Street Angel was a success but Lucky Star (1929), which was lost until c. 1990 and then rediscovered fairly rapturously, has the feel of a chastened attempt to return to a more faithful rendition of a popular formula (or two). Again, the thing that will come between a young couple is not merely their own attitudes, but war; the setting, however, is not the proles' Paris but a rural hamlet out of a Griffith film or Tol'able David. The mistake of making Farrell a layabout artist is reversed as firmly as could be imagined-- he's not only a rugged pole-climber for the electric company, but in the opening scene winds up trading punches with his boss at the top of the pole! In the war he loses the ability to walk, and back home in a wheelchair he forms a friendship with young Gaynor, who's good-hearted white trash. But her harridan mom has eyes set on Farrell's old boss, a scoundrel and a rake in his Army uniform who, however, looks to be prosperous and, most importantly, has two working legs.
Again the movie does Farrell few favors by reducing him to an emasculated role-- rather too much of the middle section has him offering Gaynor grooming tips and shampooing her hair, which ain't exactly how Clark Gable made it big. But it works at least as the low point from which Farrell's character will rebound when, like the shill for a faith healer, he rises from that wheelchair and heroically makes his way on two legs and crutches to save her from the scoundrel and, just as importantly, fulfill another wish of everyone in the audience who had a family member return damaged by the war. The old Seventh Heaven formula works one last time in a rousing conclusion to the silent era for the stars and the director who made them indelible. (Gaynor had one more silent to go, but we'll let that pass.)
Visually, Lucky Star survives in a much better copy than Street Angel, the UCLA restoration of which was extremely grainy (16mm blowup?), and so the real pleasure of the film is less the story, though its emotional impact is real, than Borzage's presentation of it in gauzy, shimmery late silent Poetic-o-Vision. The sets-- which may have recycled some of Sunrise's, though they're shot quite differently-- have a kind of heightened reality, presenting multiple planes on which action may take place (a house might be in the middle, for instance, but a road will wrap around front and back so that we might see action taking place either right in front of us, or up on the road behind the house. It's not exactly stage-like, but certainly not realistic either; maybe the best analogy is to something like the entire fantasy town constructed for Robert Altman's Popeye, which allowed his improvisational camera to poke around at will (unlike the sets in so many fantasy films, e.g. a Batman movie, which are clearly just what the storyboard shows for that shot and no more).
Borzage's camerawork is not improvisational, it's clearly planned, but it's also just as clear that the whole environment is quite solid and detailed, and this sort of dreamlike vividness makes Lucky Star one of that group of utterly accomplished and visually masterful late silents that show us everything that was about to be lost forever with the transition to sound. Indeed, in Lucky Star's case even that final testament to silence was lost for 60 years-- until, like Chico in Seventh Heaven, against all odds it made its way back from the land of the dead.
We should respect the other fellow's religion, but only to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is attractive and his children intelligent. —H.L. Mencken
Sorry, but I am going to have to disagree with you. While I love 
I'm very excited about the prospect of finally seeing this great film in a nicely restored print! 