FRANK BORZAGE
Lazybones (1925)
A sweetly melancholy story of the continued romantic disappointments of a small-town lay-about. The setting is so serene, the hero so undetered that the movie doesn't really seem as sad as it really is, and therein lies its charm. The film also has a preference for some very long shots, often of characters looking through (real) windows out onto (real) countryside, and most notably in a traveling shot of a mother on a carriage passing the yard, seen in the distance, where her young child is being secretly kept by the protagonist of the film. Stunning stuff. Nice to see what the good-word about a dramatic Zasu Pitts is truly about, she's a wonder.

7th Heaven (1927)
Absolutely lovely, although I found a general imbalance in the paths the girl and boy each took to transcendental "belief" of God thru mutual love. Although the girl melts into ecstasy midway through the movie, once the boy admits his fear and weakness and love for her it seems that this admission of his is only part of his path, and that his experience in war will somehow prove himself beyond his words. World War I is a place for him to use (rather than test or struggle to use) his new faith by crossing space metaphysically in the exquisite 11 o’clock exclamation, shared by the couple, one on the Front, one in Paris of "Chico...Diane...Heaven!". The ending, where the boy who died is resurrected to stumble, blind, through the Armistice crowd, plunge up the seven flights of stairs, and embrace his mourning, disbelieving girl, is the height of Borzage's depiction of transcendent romantic-humanist love and belief.

Street Angel (1928)
So similar to 7th Heaven that this film's "missing war" (as the thing that separates the couple at the very peak of their "untroubled" love is the girl's past of solicitation and robbery rather than the boy being sent off to fight, as in that film and in A Farewell to Arms) deflates the extra-mythicness of Borzage's love-will-triumph template. Which is a shame, because this film is far more visually audacious than that previous one. Obviously influenced by Murnau's Sunrise, Borzage uses long-takes, elaborate camera movements (including a near 360 degree crane shot of studio-Naples), an unusual escape to outside location photography, and expressionist lighting to make the setting far more urbanized, interiorized, and dangerous, thereby making the relationship far more exquisite and seemingly singular. This new visual technique highlights some of the director's best sequences: the scene immediately after the girl admits she too loves the boy is shot from an overhead angle of the girl teetering on stilts, peering down at her loved one, as the two whistle a love-tune at each other (then she spies a policeman and she plummets from her heavenly happiness); and towards the end a near-reworking of Sunrise's night search of the sea, where the girl and boy wander the docksides in the fog, each equally despondent. The boy uses matches to light the faces of passing women until he accidentally finds the girl, and the look on Gaynor's face as it goes from fear to surprise to joy to fear again is a wonder. I think Borzage, when he is “on,” may craft the best endings of any filmmaker I’ve seen.

The River [incomplete] (1928)
Exists only in a fragmented form, missing the beginning and the ending and keeping only the middle romance. I was a bit disappointed to find that this print had titlecards and still images to fill in the missing information, because I secretly wanted to be very disoriented plot-wise and left only with Borzage's romanticism. However, on the whole the effect was somewhat similar because unlike the director's later, better romances, this one is pretty much entirely drained of social context. Instead, metaphors of nature are used to label everything: the man and a hibernating bear, the woman and a raven, the seasons passing as the passages of their relationship, the river as life's path, whirlpools as despair, the ocean as death/transcendence, etc.

Bad Girl (1931)
A most modest Borzage. The first half hour or so is the best, all get-outta-the-tenement dreams and hard-boiled, 1930s urban matchmaking, the hopes of a couple continually juxtaposed by the ravages both of the Depression and of life in general. (The long scene at the bottom of the staircase of the girl's tenement building after her first date says it all; as the couple push and pull and talk about their lives while essentially figuring out how much they like one another, person after person climbs the stairs behind them, a single mother, an alcoholic old man, a woman whose mother just died...) A very sweet, very simple film, the main issue is that the script has a problem making convincing the contrivance that the girl thinks her husband doesn't want the child she is pregnant with, and the guy thinks his wife doesn't want it either. But the script isn't the only problem, because at the dramatic moment where both halves of the couple realize that each love the kid and each other as much as they themselves do, Borzage does little cinematically to emphasize the climax.

A Farewell to Arms (1932)
At first I was squirming against the rapidly condensed pace of the film, the initially forgettable female lead, and most especially against that particular brand of stiff, brash, devilishly handsome but callously wooden early 1930s Gary Cooper (cf. Sternberg's Morocco). But quickly Borzage's impressionism got the better of me, the sheer ethereal bizarreness of the images (including several long-take Kubrick-like tracking shots), and the movement of the character relations from caricatures to parable-like, ecstatic embodiments. Everything, as they say, eventually becomes clear and almost all the film's initial drawbacks return to become its most affecting assets (witness Cooper crying in that single shot in the cafe, without a doubt his best work). The impressionistic montage of Cooper’s vision of World War I as he marches A.W.O.L. back to a Milan he mistakenly thinks still is home to his wife seems the climax of the film as visual poetry, that is, until the transcendent end that, after the most exquisite of long-take close-ups (a dying Helen Hayes lays on a hospital pillow, her blond hair haloing her head), overlays the death of the maiden with bells proclaiming the end of the war. Hurray for perfected sentimentality!

Secrets (1933)
Serenely idiotic film that lacks the seriousness with which Borzage treats his subjects in his best films. Until, that is, Pickford finds her seemingly protected baby inexplicably dead during a frontier gunfight and Borzage momentarily shifts the film around from whatever-it-was-about to registering trauma with a capital "T", mother rocking listlessly with dead infant in her arms, mother walking zombie-like out of a burning doorway with baby, flames licking at the pair, etc. Otherwise, a pretty tepid look at a marriage-through-the-ages, except for that fact that the temporal montages featuring rocking pendulums and spinning wheels instead of simply implying that time has passed instead seem to evoke the idea of cyclical stages of human relationships. The film is thereby most interesting in its pattern of happiness-pain-happiness, except that the happiness lacks the Borzage Bliss, and the pain is only seen twice, once in the wrenching death scene mentioned above, and again in a disgusting scene where Pickford excuses her husband's decades of philandering.

Little Man, What Now? (1934)
The story doesn't stand out much, and the ending is an unexpected mix of bliss-of-the-moment and dark-clouds-on-the-horizon, but the lead casting is exceptional. Especially unexpected is dewy male lead Douglass Montgomery, who is less the doltish hunk that is often the Borzage lead and instead has a silent film-style intensity and passion that seems to persevere through all time. In fact, despite the film's opening scrawl about the strength of a man laying in the love of a good woman, it is actually the odd combination of a distant look of steeped love in Montgomery's eyes and a sort of I-can-face-anything-because-I'm-doing-it-for-love attitude that both propels and supports the character. Best of all is the hint of darkness, the turmoil of the effaced Weimar setting and Depression atmosphere making it clear at nearly every turn that if Montgomery was not so focused on his wife he might pick up a knife or a brick and wrought a revolution.

No Greater Glory (1934)
My first Borzage, and what a film! (And apparently it's a fairly atypical film of his.) This movie exemplifies the ability for a film's evocations, humanism, emotion, and spirituality to surpass any ideological stance. The movie, which is about two rival gangs of young boys in Hungary who "wage war" over an abandoned lot they each want to play in, ostensibly supports war, but the heart and sincerity and beauty of characters in these young boys (so exquisitely acted!) make it easy to ignore the fact that these qualities come out in their zeal to fight, defend, and attack each other.

Stranded (1935)
Workman-like Borzage film, with a semi-feminist edge, namely that Kay Francis likes her job as a social worker and won't give it up to marry her loved one. The fact that it is social work is what primarily sabotages the feminist subtext, as it's not just any job but one that is posited ideologically as pro-humanity (in opposition to the man's fascist scum-of-the-earth theory) and therefore one sides easily with her belief and her vocation rather than the actual idea of a woman retaining a job after marriage. This is very much Depression Era Cinema though, and has an interest in work and immigration and a helping hand, and it uses the still not finished construction of the Golden Gate Bridge as a vague metaphor.

Desire (1936)
Oh no, what happened? Lubitsch producing, Borzage directing and Dietrich and Cooper starring, and yet! It seems to lack pizazz on all fronts: having neither the wit nor the frothy pace of a Lubitsch (the pace of this film is of a ship dead in the water), nor the gritty-gauzy romance of a Borzage (the ending union is supremely pathetic), all that's left is half measures and brief moments. Chief among the latter is the first embrace of Dietrich and Cooper, which is probably one of the cinema's all time greatest on-screen kisses.

Green Light (1937)
Further proof that Borzage was one of the biggest hit-or-miss masters of the classical Hollywood era, especially with supremely mediocre material like this pious, borderline didactic production. But bad Borzages are far from hack works; a handful of early close-ups of Spring Byington that shimmer with a fresh clarity more common of cinematography and films of the 1960s hint at the pretty darn good final fourth of the film. This finale, like so many Borzage films, is restricted to the intimacy of a bedroom (cf. The River, Seventh Heaven, A Farewell to Arms, and more) and focuses, again as usual, on tremulous lines between fleshiness, selflessness and selfishness wrapped in insular selflessness, love, sacrifice, and faith, and of all the world draining away in these ideal attributes. Perhaps the narrative's largest failing point is the gradual murkiness of ideology, faith, torment, and passion that wracks protagonist Errol Flynn, as by the end it is more than a little unclear what his self-sacrifice and brush with death is serving for. The sidestepping of the film's love story, and, inside this love story, a mirroring plot of sacrifice that is unfortunately ignored by the film's end, makes the conclusion significantly less transcendent and moving as Borzage's best, but the conclusion alone makes the film worth viewing.

Mannequin (1937)
Curious ties between people in this movie, but the actual drama and romance are pretty lifeless.

The Shining Hour (1938)
Borzage's film is complicated substantially by a four way relationship, Joan Crawford's showgirl alighting with Melvyn Douglas' good-ole-wealthy-farmer, but being attracted immediately to his brother, Robert Young. Young is married to Margaret Sullavan, who loves Young in the same unconditional way Douglas loves Crawford. The mismatched ideal couple provides for a fascinating drama of negotiating one's future, happiness, and compromises in love, but Crawford is the film's focus and she is most definitely not a good Borzage-ian woman, far too physical, solid, obstinate, and concretely driven. As such, her wayward story gets hijacked by Sullavan, who, again as in The Mortal Storm and others, so beautifully expresses the tender, fragile, but pure ideal of love that Borzage has. This upsetting of the female stars is not really a problem in the film (as Crawford and Sullavan's relationship is fascinating, even if the former seems an ill-fit), the problem is that Sullavan's male counterpart, Douglas, either is not allowed or is unable to express in a male way the same kind of unfettered, spiritual devotion that she can.

Three Comrades (1938)
This, along with the other Borzage I really liked (No Greater Glory), has a quality all of its own. The only comparison I could possibly make is to the Powell/Pressburger films of the 1940s, which simply feel different from anything else put out by studios at the time. Here, it is the idealistic value of spiritual friendship. The film is so strangely sincere that it comes off feeling far more serious than most Hollywood pictures I have seen, as if what is being expressed on screen is a kind of perfection of human relations that can not be dismissed. After reading about what the Fitzgerald screenplay was originally like (set in Germany in the 1930s rather than the 1920s, and dealing more with antisemitism and the Nazis directly) I wonder how the movie would be if it had a historical immediacy or specificity than the dreamy studio Germany it ended up with.

Strange Cargo (1940)
As seems the surviving grace of even mediocre Borzage like this, there are some close-ups of Crawford (seemingly with very little makeup) that leap out of the diegesis, expressing something both about human flesh and how the soul can be expressed from it. Gable is not so lucky; like when Sternberg works with actors whose identities are already well-formed and unshakable (cf. John Wayne in Jet Pilot), Borzage has trouble getting Clark to express something beyond or through his star image. Which is why his concluding revelation is staged during a very dramatic lightening storm, so that the tumult of the mise-en-scene takes a large degree of the cinematic burden away from the actor, though to be fair his brief moment of realization resonates fairly decently with sincerity. The plot is mostly a very clunky and heavy-handed use of religion and faith.

The Mortal Storm (1940)
A bit disappointing because this, like Renoir's The Rules of the Game, despite its reputation, is not a singular work. Rather, it is "merely" a very strong and particularly emblematic film inside a director's already-impressive corpus. I suppose I was expecting another 7th Heaven, but instead get "merely" a solemn and actually fairly romantically restrained take on the perils of fascism. Some might take issue with Margaret Sullavan's martyrdom at the film's end, which although similar to the female deaths that end many of Borzage's best work, also feels forcefully required by the narrative. However, to balance this issue off (or at least afford it more complexity than simple schematic symbolism), from Sullavan Borzage issues a trembling, glowing emotional expression, a rapture of pure, near-transcendental (sorry, I had to use the word) love, emotion, and faith. It is one of the best performances of a Borzage film. A second viewing is required, and I'm kicking myself that I was unable to see it on film, as I'm sure William Daniel's photography is beautiful.

I've Always Loved You (1946)
Mostly a failure (poorly cast, the girl is far away from the strong, waif-like Borzage archetype; the male character is uncharacteristically split across two men, the "good" one not interesting in the least; too long and awkwardly paced), but by far the boldest, most complex, and most complicated Borzage I've yet seen. Desire, platonic, erotic, ambitious, and egomaniacal all swirl around in the film, dodging in and out of the thrilling and ambiguous motif of classical concert playing (the idealization of life through art, art’s monumental quality, organic/mechanical, master/slave are all evoked motifs) and, more sinisterly, of incest. This is the darkest, most disturbing Borzage I've seen, and yet it is married to the most luscious Technicolor photography, huge sets, and truly amazing location shooting at the kind of idyllic cabin the director used to use models for in the 1930s (all from B-studio Republic Pictures!). The movie is at its strongest during a highly experiment sequence that lets part of the Rachmaninoff Concerto No.2 play out in real time at Carnegie Hall as the egotistic maestro conducting has a power struggle with his protégé on the piano. Ends completely "wrongly," yet this is all the more reason the film is strange and weird and fascinating.

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