Post by petrolino on Mar 17, 2018 1:13:36 GMT
'Wings' is a whirlwind war picture set in the high skies in 1917. In small town America, local love rivals Jack Powell (Charles 'Buddy' Rogers) and David Armstrong (Richard Arlen) sign up for combat during the 1st World War. The two men attend training camp before being deployed to France where America is fighting alongside allies against the Central Powers. Local girl Mary Preston (Clara Bow) is stationed in the city of Paris when she responds to a call-up for medical personnel.
In 'Wings', viewers are invited to experience similarities and contrasts between an idyllic suburban enclave, a knockabout training camp, the saucy "fairyland" of Gay Paree, depressed battlefields and aerial combat zones. The story confronts the ultimate tragedy of war and lays bare the price of freedom.
It's obvious from the get-go that 'Wings' won't be your typical war film. Director William Wellman launches into action with left-of-centre framing and chaotic camera positioning, sculpting an arresting introductory opening to 'Wings' that carries painted inter-title cards. A quickfire mechanic job and the ensuing automobile ride establish a polyrhythmic storytelling format, encouraging cameraman Harry Perry to peer through a motioning swing and a stationary tree as Wellman toys with perspective while cutting characters within the frame like an Edgar Degas painting. This movie constantly shifts gears and doesn't hesitate to punish emotion.
Wellman continued to shoot features this way for decades to come, earning a reputation as an impassioned idealist whose idiosyncracies usually surfaced as he searched out the bitter truth behind the human race's self-destructive urges with journalistic instinct. The studios realised they'd unearthed a mean, vociferous filmmaker with an uncanny flair for comic illusion, but fortunately for Wellman, they by and large considered his talent to be worth the aggravation.
'Wings' is a technical training exercise that's meticulously researched yet casually authentic as the period detail takes some liberties. The narrative rains down punches during slapstick army drills, rings downhill like a bicycle with no brakes and piles on the military madness. Wellman pushed camera technology to the outer limits in order to achieve the effects he was striving for. Deadly sky battles and dangerous flights of fancy in 'Wings' employ spectacular p.o.v. shots; verbal sparring and dissolute frolics at ground level join hands with high contrast lighting experiments, double exposures and jump cuts to keep the action stirring. The climactic trick montage at a cottage blessed by Jesus (with its own cemetery of crosses) is one of the great set-pieces in war movies.
‘Wings’ was presented with the first Academy Award for Best Picture at the first annual Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award ceremony in 1929, which honoured films of 1927 and 1928. In 1997, ‘Wings’ was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. This film is dedicated to the brave young pilots of the American airforce.
'Lucky Star' is a romantic melodrama that traces a direct line through the devastating impact left by World War 1 on a small farming community in rural America. Timothy Osborn (Charles Farrell) and Martin Wrenn (Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams) are telephone lineworkers who enlist in the army at the outbreak of the 1st World War. The men enter the same military unit and are stationed in France where they engage in hand-to-hand combat on the battlefield. Martin returns home a hero having been promoted to the rank of sergeant and Tim learns to use a wheelchair having sustained serious injuries due to shellfire. Both men meet up again with the same local thief whose honour they once fought over atop a powerline, Mary 'Baa Baa' Tucker (Janet Gaynor).
'Wings' places an emphasis on life during combat but it features some poignant scenes concerning those back home. 'Lucky Star' focuses more on the aftermath of the war though it does include a desolate section detailing life during combat. It's a tale of loneliness lensed like a series of paintings, director Frank Borzage frequently drawing figures from a landscape. Themes of displacement, trauma and despair resonate throughout but the film also celebrates diversity, inclusion, innovation, invention and experimentation.
Charles Farrell gives one of his greatest performances as Tim who puts a brave face on his seclusion while building Rube Goldbergesque devices and contraptions in an effort to make his home more user friendly. Janet Gaynor submerges herself in her own disgrace as feral wildcat Mary, a compulsive liar, unscrupulous thief and aggressive cannibal. Despite her shortcomings, Mary projects the entrepreneurial spirit that's needed to rebuild communities in the aftermath of war but she needs serious refinement under Tim's guidance. Fortunately, Tim knows from his days in conflict that Mary's been learning to spell better because she likes to write beside a burning lamp. She's also a hard worker, helping her widowed mother out on their dairy farm while attending to her three little siblings. Mary doesn't find time for bathing though she's fond of wiping her runny nose with her hand and running it down her dress. Her transition from being a nebulous figure in the shadows to feeling like a lady could inspire her to give up the grift though her catatonic condition remains.
'Lucky Star' is an affecting drama that's intelligent, lyrical and picturesque. Frank Borzage's subtle artistry exudes from every frame as he fashions a poetic study of the human condition. If you enjoy 'Seventh Heaven' (1927) and 'Street Angel' (1928), you might enjoy this too.
"Hey, if youse guys need kissin', I'll kiss you ~~ wit' a gun butt! Fall in!"
Charles Rogers, Clara Bow & Richard Arlen
'To The Kill' - Violent Femmes
Charles Rogers, Clara Bow & Richard Arlen
'To The Kill' - Violent Femmes
In 'Wings', viewers are invited to experience similarities and contrasts between an idyllic suburban enclave, a knockabout training camp, the saucy "fairyland" of Gay Paree, depressed battlefields and aerial combat zones. The story confronts the ultimate tragedy of war and lays bare the price of freedom.
"Paramount, actually, was coming a bit late to the game with “Wings.” Two previous big studio productions, MGM’s “Big Parade” (directed by King Vidor in 1925) and Fox’s “What Price Glory” (Raoul Walsh, 1926), had already begun the process of romanticizing and reclaiming the traumatic experience of the Great War. But those were films about foot soldiers, while “Wings” — perhaps inspired by the national wave of enthusiasm that accompanied Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 trans-Atlantic solo flight — was about the war in the air, a subject that literally required a new perspective. Paramount’s head of production, B. P. Schulberg, found what he wanted in a young and relatively inexperienced director named William A. Wellman, who had been a fighter pilot with the Lafayette Flying corps during the war and had published a book, “Go, Get ’Em!,” about his experiences.
Today the flying sequences in “Wings” would be executed using digital techniques; in the ’30s and ’40s, they would have been created with a combination of miniatures, rear projection and optical printing. But in 1927 the only way to capture these effects was to perform them in front of live cameras, and Wellman found himself at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio commanding a 220-plane escadrille staffed by Army airmen and Hollywood stunt flyers. Because the planes were too small to accommodate an actor, a pilot, a cameraman and a camera, Harry Perry, the director of photography, found a way of mounting a camera in the front cockpit so that it could be operated from the pilot’s seat. Those close-ups of Richard Arlen (who had learned to fly in the Canadian Royal Flying Corps), Buddy Rogers (who learned to fly during the production) and their comrades are gripping because they are unshakably, unmistakably real: actors filming their own performances, on sets sailing thousands of feet above the ground."
- Dave Kehr, The New York Times
"Fans of the brilliant, eccentric, and pioneering film critic Manny Farber who have been regretting his recent absence from the scene simply haven’t been looking in the right places. In fact, the sixty-five-year-old writer, teacher, and former carpenter has been a painter even longer than he’s been a critic, and over the past few years he’s been doing what he calls “auteur” paintings — canvases that recast the subjects and methods of his criticism in a number of fascinating ways. Using a bird’s-eye view of small objects on a stagelike platform, his paintings, paens to such directors as Howard Hawks, Sam Peckinpah, Marguerite Duras, and William Wellman illuminate the filmmakers’ styles and themes. “The compositions and structures are always based on my take on the directors,” Farber says. “And they’re critical in the fact that I’m usually going away from what I think is known territory, in painting as well as in movies.”
- Joanthan Rosenbaum, 'Film Criticism On Canvas'
Today the flying sequences in “Wings” would be executed using digital techniques; in the ’30s and ’40s, they would have been created with a combination of miniatures, rear projection and optical printing. But in 1927 the only way to capture these effects was to perform them in front of live cameras, and Wellman found himself at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio commanding a 220-plane escadrille staffed by Army airmen and Hollywood stunt flyers. Because the planes were too small to accommodate an actor, a pilot, a cameraman and a camera, Harry Perry, the director of photography, found a way of mounting a camera in the front cockpit so that it could be operated from the pilot’s seat. Those close-ups of Richard Arlen (who had learned to fly in the Canadian Royal Flying Corps), Buddy Rogers (who learned to fly during the production) and their comrades are gripping because they are unshakably, unmistakably real: actors filming their own performances, on sets sailing thousands of feet above the ground."
- Dave Kehr, The New York Times
"Fans of the brilliant, eccentric, and pioneering film critic Manny Farber who have been regretting his recent absence from the scene simply haven’t been looking in the right places. In fact, the sixty-five-year-old writer, teacher, and former carpenter has been a painter even longer than he’s been a critic, and over the past few years he’s been doing what he calls “auteur” paintings — canvases that recast the subjects and methods of his criticism in a number of fascinating ways. Using a bird’s-eye view of small objects on a stagelike platform, his paintings, paens to such directors as Howard Hawks, Sam Peckinpah, Marguerite Duras, and William Wellman illuminate the filmmakers’ styles and themes. “The compositions and structures are always based on my take on the directors,” Farber says. “And they’re critical in the fact that I’m usually going away from what I think is known territory, in painting as well as in movies.”
- Joanthan Rosenbaum, 'Film Criticism On Canvas'
It's obvious from the get-go that 'Wings' won't be your typical war film. Director William Wellman launches into action with left-of-centre framing and chaotic camera positioning, sculpting an arresting introductory opening to 'Wings' that carries painted inter-title cards. A quickfire mechanic job and the ensuing automobile ride establish a polyrhythmic storytelling format, encouraging cameraman Harry Perry to peer through a motioning swing and a stationary tree as Wellman toys with perspective while cutting characters within the frame like an Edgar Degas painting. This movie constantly shifts gears and doesn't hesitate to punish emotion.
Wellman continued to shoot features this way for decades to come, earning a reputation as an impassioned idealist whose idiosyncracies usually surfaced as he searched out the bitter truth behind the human race's self-destructive urges with journalistic instinct. The studios realised they'd unearthed a mean, vociferous filmmaker with an uncanny flair for comic illusion, but fortunately for Wellman, they by and large considered his talent to be worth the aggravation.
Clara Bow
'Wings' is a technical training exercise that's meticulously researched yet casually authentic as the period detail takes some liberties. The narrative rains down punches during slapstick army drills, rings downhill like a bicycle with no brakes and piles on the military madness. Wellman pushed camera technology to the outer limits in order to achieve the effects he was striving for. Deadly sky battles and dangerous flights of fancy in 'Wings' employ spectacular p.o.v. shots; verbal sparring and dissolute frolics at ground level join hands with high contrast lighting experiments, double exposures and jump cuts to keep the action stirring. The climactic trick montage at a cottage blessed by Jesus (with its own cemetery of crosses) is one of the great set-pieces in war movies.
"The striking oddities that dot William Wellman’s diverse filmography make him a difficult object unto himself. The outer motions of journeyman facility are casually ruptured by some strange inner logic: precise yet inexplicable patterns of movement, strange geographies inscribed within seemingly comprehensible landscapes, the creation of odd, private little problems which Wellman “solves” with his own arcane mathematics. The curlicues are visible even in so masterful and compact a statement as The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), judged as “one of those solemn, acclaimed works you don’t really need to see” in David Thomson’s dubious formulation of cinephilia, summarily shutting the door on one of the great American films. Too often regarded as another in the ‘40s spate of prestige liberal message pictures, Ox-Bow’s
- Andrew Tracy, Cinema Scope
"Fifty years before Steven Spielberg made a bid for verisimilitude in the depiction of frontline fighting with Saving Private Ryan (1998), William Wellman delivered a pair of war films that remain undimmed in their visceral power. Story of G.I. Joe (1945) cast actual troops en route to the Pacific, many of whom died without seeing it, with the film bearing out the lived-in details of experience. It’s an approach that extends to the terrific Battleground – whose screenwriter, Robert Pirosh served as an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge. Wellman follows the “Battered B*stards of Bastogne” with an acute sensitivity to the nuances of character and a documentarian’s eye for the grim realities of war."
- Matthew Thrift, The British Film Institute
Jobyna Ralston & Richard Arlen
'Prove My Love' - Violent Femmes
diatribe against mob justice—concerning three cowpokes hung for a theft and murder which they clearly didn’t commit—avoids platitude by relentlessly
maintaining its specificity of circumstance, and thus taking it to the universal. There’s none of the necessary (colour-)coding which Lang’s Fury (1936) had to employ, nor any added weightiness beyond the evident, shattering reality of everyday injustice. Ox-Bow’s grimly inexorable progression is given its sting by the whipcrack pace of its execution, the interminable waiting (a key Wellman motif, as Manny Farber notes) and the heavy air of inevitability pierced and accentuated by a series of short, sharp movements, both physical and verbal: the curt insolence of Henry Fonda’s sarcastically grating voice; a flurry of cigarettes lighting up irrespective of a bullying order; a searing pair of eyes the only visible part of an occluded face; the strangely compelling concealment of Fonda’s own eyes behind a hat brim as he reads a dead man’s letter; and his instantly restrained reach for a gun when his outrage finally peaks, the constraint applied to him somehow only accentuating the action’s epiphanic dynamism. While the film is a marvel of both concision and evocative punctuation, it nevertheless ruptures its seamless design in the very first scene, as the newly arrived Fonda and Harry Morgan contemplate a lurid barroom painting of a femme la nuit being unwittingly sized up for ravishment. Wellman devotes several seconds of largely silent, and pointedly edited, screen time to Fonda and Morgan’s faces as they drink the spectacle in, before Fonda notes of the would-be assailant that, “It sure is taking him a long time to get there.”- Andrew Tracy, Cinema Scope
"Fifty years before Steven Spielberg made a bid for verisimilitude in the depiction of frontline fighting with Saving Private Ryan (1998), William Wellman delivered a pair of war films that remain undimmed in their visceral power. Story of G.I. Joe (1945) cast actual troops en route to the Pacific, many of whom died without seeing it, with the film bearing out the lived-in details of experience. It’s an approach that extends to the terrific Battleground – whose screenwriter, Robert Pirosh served as an infantryman in the Battle of the Bulge. Wellman follows the “Battered B*stards of Bastogne” with an acute sensitivity to the nuances of character and a documentarian’s eye for the grim realities of war."
- Matthew Thrift, The British Film Institute
Jobyna Ralston & Richard Arlen
'Prove My Love' - Violent Femmes
‘Wings’ was presented with the first Academy Award for Best Picture at the first annual Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award ceremony in 1929, which honoured films of 1927 and 1928. In 1997, ‘Wings’ was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. This film is dedicated to the brave young pilots of the American airforce.
--- ---
'Lucky Star' is a romantic melodrama that traces a direct line through the devastating impact left by World War 1 on a small farming community in rural America. Timothy Osborn (Charles Farrell) and Martin Wrenn (Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams) are telephone lineworkers who enlist in the army at the outbreak of the 1st World War. The men enter the same military unit and are stationed in France where they engage in hand-to-hand combat on the battlefield. Martin returns home a hero having been promoted to the rank of sergeant and Tim learns to use a wheelchair having sustained serious injuries due to shellfire. Both men meet up again with the same local thief whose honour they once fought over atop a powerline, Mary 'Baa Baa' Tucker (Janet Gaynor).
"I'm gonna join the army. Them French girls seem mighty nice to me."
Janet Gaynor
'Stupid Girl' - Garbage
Janet Gaynor
'Stupid Girl' - Garbage
'Wings' places an emphasis on life during combat but it features some poignant scenes concerning those back home. 'Lucky Star' focuses more on the aftermath of the war though it does include a desolate section detailing life during combat. It's a tale of loneliness lensed like a series of paintings, director Frank Borzage frequently drawing figures from a landscape. Themes of displacement, trauma and despair resonate throughout but the film also celebrates diversity, inclusion, innovation, invention and experimentation.
"Frank Borzage worked constantly throughout the 1920s including an extended period at William Fox's Fox Film Corporation (before it merged with Twentieth Century in 1935) where he made what was arguably his best work with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in several films including the Academy Award nominated, Seventh Heaven (1927). Second only to The Jazz Singer (1927), it was the biggest box office hit of that year. The Jazz Singer made more money because it was the first full-length motion picture with sound dialogue sequences, yet it isn't screened at film festivals today the way Seventh Heaven is. Melodrama, perhaps, but it was also a silent film. Without the benefit of dialogue, directors had to rely on stronger emotions to get the story across. That Borzage was able to tell the unlikely story of a Parisian garbage collector who marries an equally penniless girl, is blinded in the war and returns to her after she believes he is dead; and yet still move a modern audience to tears rather than derisive laughter is a tribute to his skill. As his own cameraman Ernest Palmer said years later, "He had the most marvelous touch, especially when you'd get a boy and girl together." His peers evidently agreed as Borzage was the first film director to win an Academy Award for Seventh Heaven, which was handed out at the inaugural ceremony on May 16, 1929 at the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. In 1995 the film was voted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Borzage would win one other Oscar in 1932 for Bad Girl (1931).
For a director labeled as a romanticist, Borzage's political sense was acute. In the years leading up to World War II, he created films that were blatantly anti-Nazi: Three Comrades (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1940), which were so powerful that they contributed to the decision by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, to ban American films in Germany and the territories it occupied. It was a brave move by Borzage and by Hollywood not only because it meant a considerable loss of profits but they risked alienating a not insignificant portion of the domestic audience who was either sympathetic to Hitler or who preferred to remain neutral. The events of December 7th 1941 would make the point moot."
- Lorraine LoBianco, Turner Classic Movies
"From the “lyrical abstraction” (to borrow Gilles Deleuze’s precise description) of the lovers’ hideaways in 'Seventh Heaven' and 'Street Angel' to a city/country four-hander like 'The Shining Hour', from an intimist Depression romance like 'Man’s Castle' to a faintly ponderous lesson in leather-bound devotion like 'Green Light' (Borzage holds the dubious distinction of having adapted three Lloyd C. Douglas novels), Borzage’s eminently centrifugal films all feature domelike constructions: the lovers and believers occupy the enormous and exquisitely detailed center while everything around them is hazy and indistinct (war, the Depression, strikes, local color, parties, other people). The signature image for his entire cinema might be the mindbending tracking shot, in 'A Farewell to Arms', from the wounded Frederic’s (Gary Cooper’s) point of view as he’s laid out on a stretcher. The camera nestles almost erotically into the gracefully curving dome of the hospital ceiling before traveling into Frederic’s room, where the subjective POV is released only after Catherine (Helen Hayes) enters the frame and kisses Frederic, her face filling the screen in a glorious blur.
One could also profitably compare Borzage’s work to a medieval or early Renaissance illumination, as Michael Henry did in a groundbreaking Positif article called “Le Fra Angelico du mélodrame.” But while illumination is certainly a worthy metaphor for Borzage’s overpowering belief in love, the architectural metaphor gets closer to the living, physical immediacy of his films and their creation of paradisaical environments. But on a purely visual level, Borzage’s work is a lush continuation of Renaissance painting. His camera is magnetized by full-cheeked and saucer-eyed faces that fill the frame, and his lovers calmly radiate from the center of the screen; the onlookers who either step aside or stew in frustration, like Adolphe Menjou’s Rinaldi in 'A Farewell to Arms' or Melvyn Douglas’s passive husband in 'The Shining Hour', tend to have comparatively sharp, knifelike faces. When Charles Farrell looks at Janet Gaynor in her wedding dress in 'Lucky Star', or when Spencer Tracy patiently watches Joan Crawford modeling clothes in 'Mannequin', we could be looking at the humble Joseph placing a ring on Mary’s finger in Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin."
- Kent Jones, Film Comment
Charles Farrell & Janet Gaynor
'I Think I'm Paranoid' - Garbage
For a director labeled as a romanticist, Borzage's political sense was acute. In the years leading up to World War II, he created films that were blatantly anti-Nazi: Three Comrades (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1940), which were so powerful that they contributed to the decision by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, to ban American films in Germany and the territories it occupied. It was a brave move by Borzage and by Hollywood not only because it meant a considerable loss of profits but they risked alienating a not insignificant portion of the domestic audience who was either sympathetic to Hitler or who preferred to remain neutral. The events of December 7th 1941 would make the point moot."
- Lorraine LoBianco, Turner Classic Movies
"From the “lyrical abstraction” (to borrow Gilles Deleuze’s precise description) of the lovers’ hideaways in 'Seventh Heaven' and 'Street Angel' to a city/country four-hander like 'The Shining Hour', from an intimist Depression romance like 'Man’s Castle' to a faintly ponderous lesson in leather-bound devotion like 'Green Light' (Borzage holds the dubious distinction of having adapted three Lloyd C. Douglas novels), Borzage’s eminently centrifugal films all feature domelike constructions: the lovers and believers occupy the enormous and exquisitely detailed center while everything around them is hazy and indistinct (war, the Depression, strikes, local color, parties, other people). The signature image for his entire cinema might be the mindbending tracking shot, in 'A Farewell to Arms', from the wounded Frederic’s (Gary Cooper’s) point of view as he’s laid out on a stretcher. The camera nestles almost erotically into the gracefully curving dome of the hospital ceiling before traveling into Frederic’s room, where the subjective POV is released only after Catherine (Helen Hayes) enters the frame and kisses Frederic, her face filling the screen in a glorious blur.
One could also profitably compare Borzage’s work to a medieval or early Renaissance illumination, as Michael Henry did in a groundbreaking Positif article called “Le Fra Angelico du mélodrame.” But while illumination is certainly a worthy metaphor for Borzage’s overpowering belief in love, the architectural metaphor gets closer to the living, physical immediacy of his films and their creation of paradisaical environments. But on a purely visual level, Borzage’s work is a lush continuation of Renaissance painting. His camera is magnetized by full-cheeked and saucer-eyed faces that fill the frame, and his lovers calmly radiate from the center of the screen; the onlookers who either step aside or stew in frustration, like Adolphe Menjou’s Rinaldi in 'A Farewell to Arms' or Melvyn Douglas’s passive husband in 'The Shining Hour', tend to have comparatively sharp, knifelike faces. When Charles Farrell looks at Janet Gaynor in her wedding dress in 'Lucky Star', or when Spencer Tracy patiently watches Joan Crawford modeling clothes in 'Mannequin', we could be looking at the humble Joseph placing a ring on Mary’s finger in Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin."
- Kent Jones, Film Comment
Charles Farrell & Janet Gaynor
'I Think I'm Paranoid' - Garbage
Charles Farrell gives one of his greatest performances as Tim who puts a brave face on his seclusion while building Rube Goldbergesque devices and contraptions in an effort to make his home more user friendly. Janet Gaynor submerges herself in her own disgrace as feral wildcat Mary, a compulsive liar, unscrupulous thief and aggressive cannibal. Despite her shortcomings, Mary projects the entrepreneurial spirit that's needed to rebuild communities in the aftermath of war but she needs serious refinement under Tim's guidance. Fortunately, Tim knows from his days in conflict that Mary's been learning to spell better because she likes to write beside a burning lamp. She's also a hard worker, helping her widowed mother out on their dairy farm while attending to her three little siblings. Mary doesn't find time for bathing though she's fond of wiping her runny nose with her hand and running it down her dress. Her transition from being a nebulous figure in the shadows to feeling like a lady could inspire her to give up the grift though her catatonic condition remains.
"According to Herve Dumont’s book ('Frank Borzage: The Life and Films of a Hollywood Romantic'), Borzage was perhaps the most well liked man in all of Hollywood. Every one of his actors raved about the intimate atmosphere he created on his sets, and his magic touch transformed everyone from theater stars like Helen Hayes to movie monsters like Marlene Dietrich. The haughty Josef Von Sternberg claimed that of all film directors Borzage was “most worthy of my admiration.” Borzage’s films are closer to Von Sternberg’s than you would think: Though the men’s outrageousness is inflected in drastically different directions, their obsessive sense of love and fondness for artificial locations is endemic of their rejection of prosaic reality. (Borzage had the chance to shoot Seventh Heaven in Paris, but he opted for a studio recreation, to our everlasting joy.)"
- Dan Callahan, 'Flesh And Desire : The Films Of Frank Borzage'
"Miss Janet Gaynor, who boasted that she ''never had an acting lesson in my life,'' was one of the most popular leading ladies of film in the 1920's and 30's. She began her career as an extra when she was a teen-ager. By 1934 she was receiving a yearly salary of $252,583 from Fox Films, making her Hollywood's most highly paid actress. In 1928 the Oscars were first presented, and Miss Gaynor was named best actress. The award was for her roles in three films - ''Sunrise'' and ''Seventh Heaven,'' both made in 1927, and ''Street Angel,'' released in 1928. ''Seventh Heaven,'' in which Miss Gaynor played Diane, a Montmartre waif who is rescued from hardship and cruelty, made her a star. There was no difficulty for Miss Gaynor in switching to the new talking pictures, and in 12 successive years she made 36 films for Fox, including ''Daddy Longlegs,'' ''Delicious,'' ''State Fair,'' ''The Next Best Thing'' and ''The Farmer Takes a Wife.'' But Miss Gaynor eventually tired of being typecast in the endless comedies and musicals that exploited her special qualities of innocence, vulnerability and sweetness. In 1937, she left Fox to join David O. Selznik and make ''A Star Is Born'' with Fredric March. It was to be one of her most memorable films, and she was nominated for another Academy Award. Writing in The New York Times when the movie opened, Frank S. Nugent called it ''one of the year's best shows.''
- David Bird, The New York Times
Janet Gaynor & Charles Farrell
'Please Do Not Go' - Violent Femmes
- Dan Callahan, 'Flesh And Desire : The Films Of Frank Borzage'
"Miss Janet Gaynor, who boasted that she ''never had an acting lesson in my life,'' was one of the most popular leading ladies of film in the 1920's and 30's. She began her career as an extra when she was a teen-ager. By 1934 she was receiving a yearly salary of $252,583 from Fox Films, making her Hollywood's most highly paid actress. In 1928 the Oscars were first presented, and Miss Gaynor was named best actress. The award was for her roles in three films - ''Sunrise'' and ''Seventh Heaven,'' both made in 1927, and ''Street Angel,'' released in 1928. ''Seventh Heaven,'' in which Miss Gaynor played Diane, a Montmartre waif who is rescued from hardship and cruelty, made her a star. There was no difficulty for Miss Gaynor in switching to the new talking pictures, and in 12 successive years she made 36 films for Fox, including ''Daddy Longlegs,'' ''Delicious,'' ''State Fair,'' ''The Next Best Thing'' and ''The Farmer Takes a Wife.'' But Miss Gaynor eventually tired of being typecast in the endless comedies and musicals that exploited her special qualities of innocence, vulnerability and sweetness. In 1937, she left Fox to join David O. Selznik and make ''A Star Is Born'' with Fredric March. It was to be one of her most memorable films, and she was nominated for another Academy Award. Writing in The New York Times when the movie opened, Frank S. Nugent called it ''one of the year's best shows.''
- David Bird, The New York Times
Janet Gaynor & Charles Farrell
'Please Do Not Go' - Violent Femmes
'Lucky Star' is an affecting drama that's intelligent, lyrical and picturesque. Frank Borzage's subtle artistry exudes from every frame as he fashions a poetic study of the human condition. If you enjoy 'Seventh Heaven' (1927) and 'Street Angel' (1928), you might enjoy this too.
