Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
Frank Borzage (1894-1962)
The son of an Italian stone mason, Frank Borzage was born in Salt Lake City. One of
fourteen children, he left home at fourteen to join a travelling theatrical troupe and soon
became a member of Gilmour Brown's stock company, playing character parts in mining
camps throughout the West. In 1912 Borzage went to Los Angeles, where producer-
director Thomas Ince hired him as an extra, then leading man in two and three-reel
Westerns. In 1916, he began directing films in which he starred; two years later, he gave
up acting for directing.
Borzage's early films as actor/director explore characters and situations that recur in his
later work. As Hal, the dissolute son of a millionaire in Nugget Jim's Partner ( 1916), a
drunk Borzage argues with his father and hops a frieght car which bears him to a western
mining town. Here he encounters Nugget Jim, rescues Jim's daughter from her dreary life
as a dance hall girl, and creates with them an idylic world of their own. Slightly-built and
curly-headed, Borzage conveys the innocence, energy, and optimism that became the
trademark of Charles Farrell's performances for the director in 7th Heaven ( 1927), Street
Angel ( 1928), Lucky Star ( 1929) and The River ( 1929).
Charles Farrell ('I'm a very remarkable fellow') with Janet Gaynor in a scene from Seventh Heaven ( 1927)
Borzage's origins inform a number of his films set in lower and working class milieux.
His first major success was an adaptation of Fannie Hurst's
Humoresque
( 1920), which
describes the rise to fame of a young violinist from the teeming Jewish ghetto on New
York's lower east side and his efforts, as wounded war veteran, to recover his ability to
play again. The love story of Seventh Heaven which earned Borzage the first Academy
Award for Best Director and which
Variety
labelled the 'perfect picture,' involves the
rescue of a gamine of the Parisian streets by a sewer worker, Bad Girl ( 1931), another
Oscar winner, was a work of tenement realism, favourably compared to Vidor's Street
Scene ( 1931) by contemporary critics, exploring the mundane routines of courtship,
marriage, pregnancy, and birth, and celebrating the triumphs and tragedies of an average
young couple.
Borzage specialized in narratives dealing with couples beset by social, economic, and/or
political forces which threaten to disrupt their romantic harmony. The hostile
environments of war and social and economic turmoil function both as an obstacle to his
lovers' happiness and the very condition of their love, against which they must affirm
their feelings for one another. In many of his films, the context of war obstructs the efforts
of young lovers to establish a space for themselves apart from that of the more cynical
and worldly characters around them.
Throughout his career, Borzage denounced war and violence; Liliom ( 1930) condemns
domestic abuse; a profound pacifism underlies A Farewell to Arms ( 1932), and No
Greater Glory ( 1934); and he emerged as one of Hollywood's first and most confirmed
anti-fascists, dramatizing the evils of totalitarian movements in post-war Germany in
Little Man, What Now? ( 1934), and openly attacking fascism well before American entry
into World War II in The Mortal Storm ( 1940).
Borzage's vision is genuinely Romantic in its emphasis upon the primacy and
authenticity of feeling. His lovers emerge as nineteenth-century holdovers in a
dehumanized and nihilistic modern world. The form which Borzage's romanticism most
often takes is a secularized religious allegory. In 7th Heaven, Street Angel, Man's Castle
( 1933), and Little Man, What Now?, his edenic lovers transfrom their immediate space
into a virtual heaven on earth. Chico, the hero in 7th Heaven, dies and is mysteriously
reborn; Angela, the heroine in Street Angel, becomes an angel, a transformation mirrored
in the hero's madonna-like portrait of her. Strange Cargo ( 1940), which was banned by
the Catholic church in several American cities, provides perhaps the most overt religious
allegory. In it, a group of escaped convicts and other outcasts follow a map, written inside
the cover of a Bible, through a tropical jungle. Their 'exodus' concludes with a hazardous
sea voyage in a small open boat and with the miraculous apotheosis of their Christ-like
guide. Borzage's purest lovers appear in Till We Meet Again ( 1944) in which the director
fashions an unstated, repressed romantic liaison between an American aviator shot down
behind enemy lines and the novice from a French convent who poses as his wife in order
to escort him to safety.According to Hervé Dumont ( 1993), Borzage's basic narrative
pattern in his romantic melodramas was that of Mozart's Magic Flute, and involved a
symbolic struggle resembling the rites of passage embodied in the initiation ceremonies
of Freemasonry. Borzage joined the Masion in 1919, eventually rising to the 32nd grade
('Master of the Royal Secret') in 1941. Like Mozart's Sarastro, Borzage oversees the
passage of young lovers through a series of trials and ordeals to achieve a state of spiritual
enlightenment and transformation. Borzage's repudiation of contemporary reality in
favour of an emotional and spiritual inner world proved to be out of step with post-war
American culture. After 1945 he made only four films, and his attempt to retell the great
love story of 7th Heaven to a new generation of filmgoers in China Doll ( 1958) failed to
find a receptive audience. Though various revivals of his films in the United States,
Britain, and France in the 1970s attempted to re-establish his status as a major force in
film melodrama, his work, unlike the more sophisticated and 'modern' cinema of Douglas
Sirk, has yet to achieve the critical recognition it deserves.
JOHN BELTON
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
Humoresque
( 1920); Lazybones ( 1925);
7th Heaven ( 1927); Street Angel ( 1928); Lucky Star ( 1929); Bad Girl ( 1931); A
Farewell to Arms ( 1932); Man's Castle ( 1933); Little Man, What Now? ( 1934); History
Is Made at Night ( 1937); Three Comrades ( 1938); Strange Cargo ( 1940); The Mortal
Storm ( 1940); I've Always Loved You ( 1946); Moonrise ( 1948); China Doll ( 1958);
The Big Fisherman ( 1959)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Belton, John ( 1974), The Hollywood Professionals.
Dumont, Hervé ( 1993), Frank Borzage: Sarastro à Hollywood.
Lamster, Frederick ( 1981), Souls Made Great Through Love and Adversity.
William S. Hart (1865-1946)
Although born in New York, William Surrey Hart spent his childhood in the Midwest, at a
time when it still retained much of the feel of the frontier. A career on the stage offered
him only a meagre living until he landed the part of Cash Hawkins, a cowboy, in Edwin
Milton Royle 's hit play The Squaw Man in 1905. Parts in other Western dramas followed,
among them the lead in the stage version of Owen Wister's The Virginian in 1907.
Touring California in 1913, he decided to look up an old acquaintance, Thomas Ince, who
was busy developing the studio at Santa Ynez which would soon be known as Inceville.
Ince recognised Hart's potential and offered him work at $175 a week. For the next two
years Hart appeared in a score of two-reel Westerns and a couple of features, working
with the script-writer C. Gardner Sullivan. Typically, as in The Scourge of the Desert,
Hart is cast as a 'Good Badman', frequently an outlaw moved to reform by the love of a
pure woman. In 1915 Ince and Hart joined Triangle Films, and Hart, by now a hugely
successful Western star, graduated finally to feature-length pictures.One of his most
successful Triangle films was Hell's Hinges, released in 1916. Hart plays Blaze Tracy, a
gunman hired by the saloon owner to ensure that the newly arrived preacher does not ruin
his trade by civilizing the town. But Blaze is moved by the radiance of the preacher's
sister. When a mob sets light to the church, he arrives to rescue the girl, and then takes on
the whole town single-handed and burns it to the ground. Hart's tall, lean figure and his
angular, melancholy face projected a persona imbued with all the moral certainties of the
Victorian age which formed him. To villians and to other races, especially Mexicans, he is
implacably hostile. But he is courteous, even diffident, around women. Hart is a loner, his
only companion his horse Fritz.In 1917 Hart moved to Famous Players-Lasky when
Adolph Zukor offered him $150,000 a picture. Distribution of his films under
Paramount's Artcraft label ensured great success in the years immediately after the First
World War. Not all Hart's films were Westerns, but it was the Western to which he
returned time and again. Of Hart's later films still extant, Blue Blazes Rawden ( 1918),
Square Deal Sanderson ( 1919), and The Toll Gate ( 1920) are among the best. Production
budgets increased, and more time and trouble were taken. Those which Hart did not direct
himself were entrusted to the reliable Lambert Hillyer.But as the 1920s progressed, Hart's
films began to appear dated. The pace grew ponderous; Hart, never one for the lighter
touch, took himself more and more seriously, and his tendency towards sentimentality
grew more pronounced. Hart liked to think that his films presented a realistic picture of
the West, and Wild Bill Hickok ( 1923) was an attempt at a serious historical
reconstruction. But Paramount were unhappy with it. Hart was by now 57 years old, and
could no longer present a convincing action hero to the Jazz Age audience. His next
picture, Singer Jim McKee ( 1924), was a flop and his contract was terminated.His last
film, Tumbleweeds ( 1925), released through United Artists, had $100,000 of his own
money in it. It contained some spectacular land rush scenes, but it was another failure and
Hart was forced to retire. Tumbleweeds was reissued a decade later, with a sound-track on
which Hart delivered a spoken introduction: 'My friends, I loved the art of making motion
pictures. It is, as the breath of life to me . . . .' It is an extraordinary moment, fascinating
for the glimpse it offers of a Victorian stage actor in full, faintly ludicrous rhetorical
flight, yet undeniably moving in its evocation of the world of the silent Western which
Hart embodied.
W. S. Hart featured on the cover of
Picture-Play
magazine in 1917
EDWARD BUSCOMBE
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
In the Sage Brush Country
( 1914); The Scourge of the Desert ( 1915); Hell's Hinges ( 1916); The Return of Draw
Egan ( 1916); The Narrow Trail ( 1917); Blue Blazes Rawden ( 1918); Selfish Yates
( 1918); Square Deal Sanderson ( 1919); The Toll Gate ( 1920); Wild Bill Hickok ( 1923);
Tumbleweeds ( 1925)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Koszarski, Diane Kaiser ( 1980), The Complete Films of William S. Hart: A Pictorial
Record.
Tom Mix (1880-1940)
The most popular Western star of the 1920s, Tom Mix was the epitome of a Jazz Age
movie hero. In place of the moral fervour of William S. Hart, a Tom Mix picture provided
non-stop entertainment, a high-speed melange of spectacular horse-riding, fist-fights,
comedy, and chases. Usually the stunts were performed by Mix himself. In his early
twenties he had worked as a wrangler at the famous Miller Brothers 101 Ranch, a Wild
West show based in Oklahoma. Mix was working with another show in 1909 when the
Selig Company used its facilities to make a film entitled Ranch Life in the Great
Southwest, in which he was featured briefly as a bronco-buster. Over the next seven years
Mix appeared in nearly a hundred Selig oneand two-reel Western, shot first in Colorado
and then in California.In 1917 the Fox sutdio promoted Mix to feature-length films, with
high-quality production values, much of the filming being done on location at spectacular
western sites such as the Grand Canyon. Mix's star persona was a fun-loving free spirit,
adept at rescuing damsels in distress. On screen Tom was clean-living, with no smoking
or drinking, and little actual gun-play. Villains were more likely to be captured by a clever
ruse than dispatched by a bullet. Mix made the occasional foray outside the Western for
example in Dick Turpin ( 1925), but it was the Western that made him, and he in turn
made the Fox sutdio the most successful Western producer of the age. Many of his sixty