A few weeks ago I went on a Frank Borzage binge, a deep dive into 7 films of
his that I’ve never seen before. In fact, until that week, somehow I had
managed to never see a Frank Borzage film…..ever. This was the list of films I
watched: 7th Heaven, Street
Angel, Lucky Star, Bad Girl, After Tomorrow, and The Shining Hour. Borzage represents a style of filmmaking that
would seem to me to have almost been completely eliminated from our consciousness.
Here we have a director who pulls together some fantastically staged visual
themes of love and sexuality, complete with some wonderfully expressive use of
atmosphere: streets, apartments, rooftops. Yet he throws in heavy doses of wild
melodrama. Now melodrama, in the hands of Sirk, tends to be something that
modern audiences have received well. There’s something about Sirk’s use of
color and tone that adds a layer of subversion to his melodrama. But Borzage
tells his stories with a straight face, in black and white. There’s really
nothing inherently funny or campy per se lurking beneath the surface. Borzage’s
version of melodrama is irony free, and I don’t think today’s viewers know what
to do with that.
Although 7th Heaven
gets most of the attention, and Lucky
Star is a hidden gem, Street Angel
is Borzage’s best film of the bunch that I’ve seen and is a romantic
masterpiece, standing with the greatest love stories of all time. It is the
story of a woman named Angela (Janet Gaynor), who in need of some money to
purchase medicine for her mother, attempts to prostitute herself on the street,
and winds up getting arrested for robbery and sentenced to a year in a work
house. She runs off before being imprisoned, and escapes to find her mother
dead at home. She avoids the cops and runs off to join the circus, where she
meets a painter named Gino. They strike up an awkward friendship, but soon bond
and fall in love. Their blossoming love, and impending marriage is threatened
when the police find her again. She is taken to prison while Gino is unaware.
He thinks she is lost forever, and things get really interesting when she is
released a year later.
Janet Gaynor won the first Academy Award for Best Actress for her
portrayals in three films: Sunrise
(1927), 7th Heaven (1927),
and Street Angel (1928). AMPAS first
designed these awards to be based upon an actor’s body of work for that entire
year. If you had to ask me, I think her performance in Street Angel is the best
of the three. I don’t think Sunrise capitalizes on her sincere and varied emotional qualities as well as the Borzage films, and in fact Borzage makes far
greater use of melodramatic elements than Murnau ever did. She has a girl
next-door quality about her and also a burgeoning sexuality that was not an
easy combination to pull off for other actresses in this era like Garbo,
Brooks, or Gish (all of whom were either too beautiful or too saintly for those
descriptors to match up). She has great chemistry with her leading man, Charles
Ferrell, whom she appeared with in a total of 12 films together! His
performance here is very solid, and much more understated than in 7th Heaven. Her character hovers in the realm of the Madonna/Whore complex, which is used here to
illicit some specific choices that Ferrell’s character must make regarding his
view of her. She is in fact, neither all good nor all bad, but in fact, a real
woman whom he must decide if he can love her the way she is.
Borzage’s use of wildly ridiculous melodramatic elements is to my mind,
highly entertaining and emotionally satisfying, and part of what Borzage is all about: the obstacles
thrown in love’s way forces us to sacrifice, make tough choices, and is a true
test of how devoted one really is to one's lover. Love is not proven true,
until it perseveres beyond adversity, and this is most apparent in his silent
films especially: 7th Heaven,
Street Angel, and Lucky Star. His
emphasis on depth of field, set design, and lighting were also great choices. Street Angel includes some
fantastic tracking shots and pans, use of silhouette and shadow, and of
particular note, the intense scene among the thick fog along the docks at the
end of the film. This is a spectacular shot, filled with suspense and romantic
desperation that then culminates in a perversely emotional climax that finishes
in a church. It is one of the greatest romantic endings to any film I’ve seen and
caps the film with a feverish pitch. I wish that audiences of today could
appreciate this stuff more, but we’ve been so trained to snicker and doubt the
sanity of films like this. Street Angel is too well made, and too spectacular
to be left by the wayside though. It’s a masterpiece to my mind.
