The screening at the [2018] BFI London Film Festival of Frank Borzage’s 1927 masterpiece 7th Heaven in a new restoration was cause for rejoicing. But Borzage, who directed movies from 1913 to the end of the 50s, sometimes seems in danger of shrinking down to just this one title, the way Dziga Vertov is often reduced to Man with a Movie Camera. At least this one does exemplify his crazed romantic vision.
Though Borzage made comedies, musicals and war movies, he’s known for his sentimental melodramas, which have a remarkable consistency of theme and approach. Like Hitchcock, he continued the approach of his silent movies into the sound era, using his angles and edits to tell stories pictorially and affect the audience emotionally without relying on dialogue. And in Moonrise (1948), his last great work, he pulls off a rediscovery of the power of silent expressionism comparable to Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955).
Borzage entered movies as an actor in western shorts in 1912, and attained a modest level of stardom that enabled him to start directing his own vehicles regularly within a couple of years. These early efforts are notable for their smart in-depth staging and their unusual sweetness: the corniness of the old-school western is embraced with innocent pleasure.
Over the next ten years, Borzage moved behind the camera full time and shifted from shorts to features, from westerns to melodramas and romances. There was also a move indoors as Borzage followed the industry’s tendency to rely more on studio sets, culminating in his Fox pictures of the later 20s, with their crumbling buildings and misty, crepuscular atmosphere.
Borzage is starry-eyed about romance; he wallows in it. He can easily get 45 minutes out of what happens between boy meets girl and boy loses girl, without the aid of subplots or even scene changes. Lavishing attention on the fine detail of performance, he illuminates attraction, flirtation, growing affection, wariness, confusion. The River (1928) stands as the best example of Borzage’s approach – partly because so much of it is lost: what remains is an erotic getting-to-know-you sequence played largely in one room. The director builds sexual attraction brilliantly.
A lot of this close study centres on star Charles Farrell, adept at handsome lummox roles: Borzage could use his lack of sophistication in a very sophisticated way. His male heroes are often admirably confident, bursting with can-do spirit which they impart to the heroines, lending them strength. But they’re also insensitive to the point of stupidity, and the heroines, often played by Janet Gaynor, have their work cut out raising their partner’s awareness. This dynamic is still in play in Borzage’s terrific early talkies such as Man’s Castle (1933) and Living on Velvet (1935).
Farrell was cast opposite the doll-like Gaynor so often, by different directors, that fans thought they were married; after the success of 7th Heaven Borzage paired them in Street Angel (1928) and Lucky Star (1929). He was a rare heterosexual male exponent of the women’s picture, focusing on Gaynor as the audience’s surrogate but taking care to showcase the statuesque Farrell as object of feminine desire.
These are all underclass romances, the sublime aspects of indomitable love contrasted with sordid settings (lavishly recreated on the Fox sound stages). In 7th Heaven, Farrell plays a sewer worker, but he proudly declares that he lives among the stars, in the garret the title refers to – reached via a staggering crane-shot that floats up the stairway, giving an X-ray view of the grimy tenement. Borzage, from a working-class background, understood the gap between human aspiration and grim reality.
The three films Borzage made with Farrell and Gaynor all position her in waif roles, even lower down the social scale than Farrell. With the optimist of one of Horatio Alger’s rags-to-riches novels, the Farrell character will raise the Gaynor one to his level, but at a certain point she’ll find reserves of strength and wisdom that elevate him. This sometimes results in actual on-screen miracles, or implied ones: characters literally resurrected or cured by the power of love. ‘I’ll never die!’ yells Farrell, soundlessly, in 7th Heaven.
Borzage’s romanticism is tied to a nondenominational spirituality. This sounds like it could get syrupy, but it somehow never does. For one thing, Borzage hates prudery and intolerance, so the vision of religion he promotes is idealised, positioned in opposition to any organised zealotry. A certain reticence about strong emotion is evidenced: he often seems to approach melodrama with caution, letting it slowly overwhelm us from a distance. When he does go full cornball, there’s a lunatic quality to the scenarios that pitches them beyond any normal sentiment.
I’ve been searching for weeks to find out who originated the great summary of Borzage’s work, ‘the triumph of love over plausibility’ (according to the internet it may have been me, but I’m certain this is not so). What strikes me as admirable about the line – not a put-down, as I read it – is that it sums up not only the action of a Borzage film but his conscious intent, his whole philosophy. For him, love is stronger than likelihood. The Hollywood dream machine was the perfect medium for his message.
David Cairns, Sight and Sound, December 2018
7th Heaven
Director: Frank Borzage
Production Company: Fox Film Corporation
Producer: Frank Borzage
Assistant Directors: Lew Borzage, Park Frame
Screenplay: Benjamin F. Glazer
Titles: Katherine Hilliker, H.H. Caldwell
Based on the play by: Austin Strong
Photography: Ernest Palmer, Joseph Valentine
Editor: Barney Wolf
Settings: Harry Oliver
Costume: Kathleen Kay
Restoration: Karl Malkames
Cast
Janet Gaynor (Diane)
Charles Farrell (Chico Robas)
Ben Bard (Colonel Brissac)
David Butler (Gobin)
Albert Gran (Papa Boul)
Gladys Brockwell (Nana)
Emile Chautard (Père Chevillon)
George Stone (Sewer Rat)
Jessie Haslett (Aunt Valentine)
Lillian West (Arlette)
Marie Mosquini (Madame Gobin)
Brandon Hurst (Uncle George)
USA 1927
117 mins
Digital 4K (restoration)
With live piano accompaniment
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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