52. Trifecta: Janet Gaynor Movies, reviewed by Pippa Hammet
It appears that high wind velocities make the Ebersdorf Tower roof highly unlikely as a performance space (plus, New York City winters can be harsh), so our dear Louise has turned her attention to the building’s 33rd Floor, which has handily revealed itself as a potential indoor alternative. Instead of a one-time playground for an absent spouse, Louise has envisioned turning the floor into a site for future ballet performances and rehearsals. That way, we can consign the dance studio on Floor 35 to Albertine and Paco and the felines they tend and train in the Cat Lab. Via Zoom, Cheryl and Sandy have finished a new work, Visions, and so the repertory for our projected new ballet company would appear to grow apace. Post-pandemic, things could be very busy.
Madame Beach in Siberia contacted Cheryl with a new suggestion – that she take a look at the films of Janet Gaynor. We were both familiar with Gaynor’s most famous 1939 movie, A Star Is Born. (What with subsequent remakes, Star has become the Gypsy of Hollywood: always looming on the horizon.) I had seen F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise years ago at Film Forum. We scheduled screenings of the three silent films for which she won the first Academy Award for an actress: Sunrise (1927), Seventh Heaven (1927), and Street Angel (1928). They are now all on the Internet via YouTube, without charge. They are also to be found in the sumptuous Compact Disc box set of films issued by Fox and MoMA (“Murnau, Borzage and Fox”), which Louise gave me years ago as post-transition celebratory present. The box has been sitting there on my bedroom book shelf. Time to explore.
Sunrise, of course, has been hailed as the greatest film ever made on a number of occasions and by a number of journals and critics. (The French adore it.) I can see how it would be possible to be immersed in its many cinematographic accomplishments (the powerful German Expressionist black and white photography; the moving camera sequences, including the famous streetcar transition from country to city; the sheer scale of the production). And the film’s motivic structure is virtuoso – one example, the bulrushes that are both part of the murder plot and ultimately salvific in leading to the country Wife’s rescue. In that sense, the film’s unity of design has all the distinguishing UFA studio hallmarks to be found in Lang and Hitchcock. Murnau also handles his actors’ mime style with restraint for the most part, and this allows Janet Gaynor to humanize the action with her transparent versions of fear and joy before her Husband’s schizoid actions. The movie relies on the period’s fascination with the theme of Carnival in the Mikhail Bakhtin sense, here represented by the married couple’s visit to a grotesque Big City version which is (how shall we say?) overblown and which leads to a chase with a pig that feels highly extraneous to the themes of the film. Perhaps Murnau gave in to someone’s estimation of Hollywood commercialism and allowed his movie to become inflated unnecessarily. Perhaps here he is condescending to his audience.
Gaynor continued the Mary Pickford waif archetype into a modern set of dramatic terms. Gaynor is so readable in her play of emotions, she is able single-handedly to set a rhythm for a scene and then to develop it past the point where another actress would cede control. (Comparable later actresses on Gaynor’s expressive level would be Geraldine Page and Sissy Spacek.) At first, you think that Gaynor’s face is too round and her mouth too small, too doll-like, but this impression fades before the strength of mind that her entire body can communicate. When she hurls herself against a tall male partner (for example, her regular co-star Charles Farrell), the visual poignancy results from the man becoming simultaneously her protector and her avatar. Gaynor also has a wonderfully convincing sour-apple mouth when required. Her best moments here are in the photographer’s studio, where she can become comically transgressive. The role is basically old-fashioned, but Gaynor invests it with fresh emotional details. Unfortunately, Margaret Livingston as the Woman from the City cannot similarly renovate her vamp because the character is condemned morally by the narrative as the source of the murder plot. In a sense, the film is too obviously melodramatic for any real integration of the sustained lyric moods to which it aspires. Its aesthetic force becomes lumbering. Janet Gaynor adds what individual grace she can. If only we could see the subsequent “lost” Murnau work with Gaynor, 4 Devils. The stills from that 1928 film are fascinating. I remain a fanatic about Murnau’s Nosferatu. Now there is a great movie.
The many films of Frank Borzage, both silent and sound, may strike today’s viewers as sentimental, I suppose, but true, convincing stage or screen sentiment has never scared me off. Borzage’s movies allow a wide range of expression for his actors and actresses, and they are often critical of emotionalism, at least certain types of feeling directed at incorrectly perceived objects. The drama is usually in the service of emotional realism (as in the great films of D. W. Griffith). Borzage’s cinematic style is a theatrical one derived from the stage genre termed “poetic realism”. Later Italian films versions of the mode would be Fellini’s La Strada and Visconti’s White Nights. Classic American theater works would include Our Town and West Side Story. Borzage’s movies deal with the radical transformation of a character’s view of the world. They evoke complicated forms of sentiment. At their best, they allow an achieved insight into what could be termed the “miraculous” and feature magical types of narrative apotheosis that possess metaphysical implications. I am not myself repelled by this thematic and stylistic approach to art. I am, rather, definitely intrigued, since it offers a respite from the flat, timid literalisms of contemporary filmmaking.
Borzage’s Seventh Heaven shows the effect of the coming of Murnau to Hollywood. For example, I hold the German director responsible for the way the second half of Heaven is taken up with the advent of the First World War and the siege of Paris. It is filmed as though the conflict was a form of riotous Carnival, interposing new obstacles between the lovers played by Gayor and Charles Farrell. Early in the narrative, Gaynor’s Diane is inert and infinitely vulnerable. But she has a wonderful scene trimming her beloved Chico’s hair in their seventh-floor aerie, which leads to his decision to allow her to live with him. And Gaynor also has a sequence of retribution against a sadistic sister, complete with von Stroheim riding crop and a dance of triumph synchronized to the declaration of war in the streets below. It is as though this movie had been made to win an Academy Award. (The narrative is based on a smash-hit play of the period, but the wartime melodrama can feel inflated and manufactured.) With Heaven, Borzage made Gaynor a star and set the pattern for her lengthy acting partnership with Farrell. The director found a way to combine elements of German Expressionism (architectural design, camera movement, strong contrasts in lighting) with his gentle form of comic drama. The result has an edge of hysteria, as though French characters are always naturally high-strung and unpredictable. However, the film’s shifts in tone are more palatable than those in Murnau’s Sunrise, perhaps because they are fabular rather than procedural. The famous ending of the movie was imitated in Carné-Prevert’s final scene for Les Enfants du paradis, another example of cinematic poetic realism. Seventh Heaven is not my favorite Borzage film. Laudo tamen.
Here I must pause and comment upon the shift in acting styles between the late 1920s and today. The emphasis on characters in the silent film era who are facing social injustice as well as existential and psychological challenges creates an opportunity for depictions of emotional vulnerability that is striking when set against the armored reactions of many protagonists in 2020’s movies. We have all known young people in society who take on a cynical imperviousness before emotionally difficult situations in life. Our films today are almost entirely made up of such defensive or semi-opaque characters, men and women who eschew evident weakness or emotional frailty. Modern audiences may be embarrassed by emotional display and may prefer to guess at the full nature of a mental response. Above any question of what this says about our society and its education of the young, such a preponderant emphasis on invulnerability has, in my view, led to a narrowing of expressive possibilities in acting on stage and screen. Thus do a culture’s fears find reflection in its arts. Perhaps something has been gained by what can seem a callow toughness in contemporary performers and their characters. But I think something may also have been lost. Emotion in today’s films is not as full-bodied as its examples in these movies with Janet Gaynor.
Borzage’s Street Angel is a masterpiece, even in its indebtedness to Murnau. True, it has expressionistic Neopolitan sets that appear to be carved from the side of a mountain. True, the camerawork is ostentatiously mobile, and shadows and fog dominate the movie’s finale. True, “O sole mio” is referred to one time too many on the synchronized soundtrack. But the idea of Carnival is here made integral to the theme of the narrative: Carnivalistic masquerade is the very feature that must be overcome in the lives of the characters. Gaynor plays Angela, a cynical young woman in a travelling side-show. She’s a “chippie” (guilty of soliciting, if not of the sexual act) with a low self-image and a hatred of men. Charles Farrell plays Gino, a street artist, who paints her portrait. He has an over-idealized image of his muse. Both characters must ultimately remove their Carnival masks and confront the reality of who they really are to themselves and for one another. Street Angel does not feel overblown. Its vignette structure allows just enough time in each sequence to give its two main characters a chance to discover truths about their limitations and their love.
Borzage’s use of space and architecture is expressive throughout. Here is a perfect example of what our Cheryl has termed “affective topography”. You come to know the streets and shops of Naples. You memorize that wall where once was hung the portrait of Angela that the lovers were forced to sell in order to buy food. Even the film’s urban shadows indicate the disorientation of Gino when he eventually loses Angela. Those vivid shades represent a kind of filmic sfumato – not only moral blacks and whites but all the psychological greys which adult life interposes between the lovers. When the film ends in Naples’ wharves, the two are shrouded in fog but clarified in their visions of one another.
Again and again, we watch the process of mental and spiritual transformation on the faces and bodies of Gaynor and Farrell. The movie includes a kind of glossary of physicalized thought process: submission, abasement, abjection, supplication, triumph, contentment, delight. The variations on these mimetic gestures become leitmotifs under Borzage’s hands, illuminating retrospectively the various stages in the spiritual development of street angel and street artist. Borzage’s camera holds on the shifts of emotion as though only in such transformation is there true vitality, an event worth our absorption before the screen.
And I have seldom seen two actors able to give a director such precise physical reactions in sustained mime scenes, so “through-line” and sculptural in reaction to types of lighting, so sensitive to emotional scale within the individual dramatic moment, and so alert to established gestural rhythms and their possible extension. The effect is dance-like. There is a moment when Gaynor hurls herself at the feet of Gino as she realizes she must leave him that is one of the great moments in world cinema. And this is followed by the One Hour scene, in which the girl indulges her lover in a celebratory dinner, knowing that she faces police arrest immediately thereafter, an acting test of Gaynor’s emotional range that establishes her art beyond mere popularity.
Cheryl and I are highly impressed by Gaynor and Farrell under Borzage’s direction. Cheryl has pressed on in looking at subsequent achievements of the trio. She tells me that the intimate Lucky Star (1929) is a perfect indication of what an ongoing film collaboration can accomplish. Cheryl says that Farrell is particularly impressive there and in the fragments of the “lost” 1928 The River (where he is paired with the sensual Mary Duncan rather than with Gaynor). I have my work cut out for me. Borzage is now my man. Gaynor and Farrell made twelve films together.
I have just taken the opportunity of looking again at Gaynor’s A Star Is Born, which was directed by William Wellman. The film now comes across as machine-tooled in its narrative. Only in the later scenes do Gaynor and Frederic March relax into their shared scenes and produce a semblance of a newly married couple. The Technicolor spectacle often drains emotion away from the actors. Their art has become “official” rather than exploratory.
Beyond Gaynor and Farrell, I took another look at Borzage’s History Is Made at Night. It contains one of my favorite scenes in romantic comedy-drama, the scene in the deserted Victor’s restaurant where society wife Jean Arthur is reunited with Charles Boyer as its head waiter. Previously, Arthur has recognized her Parisian amour and guessed his elaborate attempt to locate her in New York. Instead of creating a disruptive “scene”, Arthur’s character leaves the restaurant with her husband and then abandons him in their taxi to return to Victor’s for an intimate reunion. The dramatic entrance of Arthur, the slow recognition by Boyer of the complex situation the lovers find themselves in, the considered adjustment of two adults to one another’s fates and needs – these are the mature marks of an extraordinary film director. You can recognize these signs through the stress that Borzage permits, the way he holds upon a characterizing moment. It is the achievement of a film poet. The dramatic machinery works to make room for those emphases, and the filmmaker lingers upon them for the benefit of his characters and for us in the audience. It is one type of “privileged moment” (to adapt a term from Francois Truffaut) that a master can sometimes allow us.
I think Cheryl and Sandy work to permit such moments in their choreographies. I must talk to both about this achieved freedom to linger on what needs to be noticed and felt.
P.H.
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