Lucky Star (1929)

Lucky Star was the third movie that Frank Borzage made with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. In this one, Gaynor does not play a prostitute, but she still shares characteristics with the characters in the first two movies: she is a young woman who is abused and living in deprivation. Here she is a farm girl being worked to death and beaten by a stern mother who is raising a family and running the farm without a husband. (Another thing all three of Gaynor's characters have in common is no father. The other Borzage film I've watched, Lazybones, is about a ne'er-do-well who becomes the ward of another fatherless girl. It gets into uncomfortably incest-like territory, although apparently not intentionally.) Once again Gaynor is redeemed by the true love of a good man. This time she has to be saved from a cad who has charmed her mother, in fact.

Farrell's characters vary more from film to film. Here he is a WWI veteran who is paralyzed from the waist down and thus in doubt of his own manhood. It still seems to me that the first of the three films, Seventh Heaven (1927), is the strongest because Farrell's character is also redeemed by love. On the other hand, his wounded character in Lucky Star is redeemed in a different way, so I'm not sure this analysis holds up. It's just that his character is so noble from the get-go that he is not morally redeemed, which seems initially less interesting.

Gaynor's naive, spunky, curious farm girl is the main attraction, at least as far as the characters go. Borzage is able to portray innocence very powerfully. The other two movies are set in cities (Paris and Naples, respectively), but the hard work of farm life is vividly captured here. I'm not sure what it is, but Borzage's stories are fascinating in their unfurling. They are so simple, but he is able to find the deep feeling in the smallest of gestures. All three of these movies are about the birth and blooming of true love, and Borzage has a delicate feel for the fragility and resilient beauty of it. There is an incredible erotic charge lurking beneath the innocent surface that's very different from, say, Cecil B. DeMille's more lurid, knowing approach.

This is a visually magnificent film. Coming at it from the perspective of Murnau's influence (which this collection obviously encourages), you see the canted angles and the luscious shadows and detailed chiaroscuro. One scene gets darker and darker until all you can see is dim silver highlights on Farrell's face. Seventh Heaven and Street Angel may have had more arresting tracking shots, but everything here is framed to perfection, creating a pocket universe no matter whether we are looking at the farmhouse (as in the still above) or at Gaynor's glowing face.

Interview with Kathryn Bigelow

Good interview at Slant with the director of The Hurt Locker.

I've been wondering if she might win an Academy Award for Best Director for this one. Incredibly, it looks as though no woman has won a Best Director Oscar. Not many have even been nominated. I'm seeing Sofia Coppola (for Lost in Translation), Jane Campion (for The Piano), and Lina Wertmüller (for Seven Beauties). Is that really it? Pretty amazing, and not in a good way.