Deep, Deep Feeling: Love and The Cinema of Frank Borzage
The prime romantic of classical Hollywood cinema.
This month, TCM is spotlighting a collection of films by the director Frank Borzage (BORE-ZAY-GEE), the great romanticist of classical Hollywood. Borzage’s films usually focused on the power of love in hard times, elevating it to an almost supernatural effect felt by his characters and carried over into viewers. Through soft-focus close-ups and moments of intense pause, Borzage infused a deep feeling of eros and carnal desire in scenes between two love interests. And whether romantic or not, though they usually were romantic, a Borzage picture was always deeply felt all around. It wasn’t just his technical skills either; like Ernst Lubitsch, his background in acting (when he came to Hollywood in 1912, the industry’s very early days) allowed him to induce these big emotions in his actors’ performances. Though unlike Lubitsch, he didn’t completely act out the scene for the actors.
Being from Salt Lake City, Borzage started his film career in the 1910s writing, directing, editing, and starring in two-reeler Westerns, all of which are quite good and where his grand romanticism began to appear. These were The Pitch o’Chance (1915), The Pilgrim (1916), and Nugget Jim’s Pardner (1916). He also was a supporting actor in a couple of films - The Typhoon (1914) and The Wrath of the Gods (1914) - with the Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa, the first Asian star in Hollywood (all of these, except The Typhoon, which has an unreleased print housed in the MOMA, are available for free on the internet in watchable qualities). It’s interesting Borzage decided to stay behind the camera full time, because he has a commanding screen presence and a striking athleticism in his cowboy roles. The most well-known film he made for the short-lived Triangle Film Corporation was The Gun Woman (1918) starring Texas Guinan, a female Western star. One of the most popular films of 1920, Humoresque, was made by Borzage from a script (or scenario as they were called during this time) by Frances Marion, one of the best screenwriters of the era.
We’re lucky to have a lot of Borzage’s directing work surviving today because few filmmakers could and still can’t visually represent so potently the necessity and healing force of that greatest of all feelings. Borzage’s major moments of love were in both big and small gestures. Like in his masterpiece, History is Made at Night (1937, one of the best films of the 1930s), where a Frenchman played by Charles Boyer opens a restaurant in Manhattan in the hopes that a socialite (Jean Arthur) - with whom he spent one unforgettable night with before getting separated on account of some unfortunate events - will hear of its popularity and dine there. Or it’s in simple lines of hushed dialogue and close-ups, like in The Mortal Storm (1940), where Jimmy Stewart’s thoughtful anti-Nazi German farmer reluctantly asks Margaret Sullavan’s Freya Roth if he has a chance with her now that she’s left her Hitler-worshipping fiancée before they’re interrupted by a Jewish friend fleeing the Nazis (knowing Stewart’s real life unrequited love for Sullavan adds a more tender sting to the scene).
Even his lesser films such as the two Warner Bros. pictures, Living on Velvet (1935) and Stranded (1935, set on and featuring real footage of the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge), two George Brent and Kay Francis vehicles, have their moments of deep romanticism. Especially Velvet, which is deftly shot and contains a magical love-at-first-sight scene. Intercuts between close-ups on Brent’s character and Francis’s character imbue ardent romantic feeling as they gaze at each other from across the room at a party, ignoring their respective conversational companions. And then Borzage switches from cutting to a pan back-and-forth with the dialogue from the companions distant but still heard as the camera moves, further connecting their coming together and lovestruck eyes in the physical closeness of the space before Brent finally walks over to her. Then a slow push-in to a medium two-shot when he approaches her at the food bar and they speak softly and nervously to each other, a chemical boiling of love only Borzage can elicit. Borzage, to my surprise, managed to get decent performances out of George Brent in these two pictures. I’ve usually found Brent to be quite bland in most of what I’ve seen of him, but in Velvet and Stranded, where, ironically, he’s playing mostly unlikeable characters, he’s not bad.
Warren William, Kay Francis, and George Brent in Borzage’s Living on Velvet
Borzage also directed Mary Pickford at United Artists in her last role before retirement, a remake of a 1924 film starring Norma Talmadge, also directed by Borzage and written by Frances Marion. Now a pre-Code Western, Secrets (1933) co-starred Leslie Howard with Pickford. Pickford and Howard’s characters marry before heading West to settle on some land where tragedy strikes and living on the range isn’t as wonderful as they’d imagined. It’s a messy, albeit entertaining picture and not much else to it. It’s most notable for being Pickford’s last gasp for relevancy; she was no longer the “Queen of the Movies” in 1933.
Borzage’s best run of films was in the 1920s. In 1925, he directed an adaptation of a W. Somerset Maugham comedy play, The Circle, for MGM. He wrapped up the silent era at Fox Film Corporation, where first he made Lazybones (1925), a beautiful romantic melodrama starring Madge Bellamy, Buck Jones, and Zasu Pitts. Then he really started to hone in his lovely visual craft and directed some of his best films, all starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell - 7th Heaven (1927, Borzage won the first Academy Award for Best Director), Street Angel (1928), and Lucky Star (1929, released in both silent and hybrid versions; the latter is now lost).
Borzage shot a musical in both the standard 35mm and Fox’s newly developed 70mm Grandeur film format, a sort of proto-CinemaScope, except the widescreen came directly from the film stock instead of a lens as would become the norm in the 1950s. Song o’ My Heart was released in 1930 but due to the lack of Grandeur projections in theaters (the Great Depression and theater owners’ preoccupation with installing sound technology halted expansion of the expensive Grandeur projectors), it was never released in the 70mm format. Fox’s Western and John Wayne’s first role, The Big Trail (1930), is the most famous surviving example of a film in that format.
He won a second Oscar for the pre-Code drama, Bad Girl (1931) and had quite a significant run in the pre-Code era as well, working for multiple studios. At Paramount, he directed Helen Hayes and Gary Cooper in an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel, A Farewell to Arms (1932). Two of his best pre-Code films were at Columbia - Man’s Castle (1933, his magnum opus) and No Greater Glory (1934). The latter picture was a rare departure for Borzage; featuring a cast of mostly children and no romance, it’s a tearjerker about two rival street gangs (one led by Frankie Darro of Wild Boys of the Road), all boys, going to war (sand bombs and fists) over a playground lot, which ends up having apartments built over it anyway. The anti-war allegory is clear, though it’s a truly sui generis narrative of the time and Borzage grounds it in a reality that makes it feel genuine and heartfelt rather than overly sentimental. It’s made even more sad by the knowledge that two of its actors, Jimmy Butler and Donald Haines, were both killed in action in WWII. Borzage’s leftist politics would also begin to make their way onto the screen during this time with Little Man, What Now? (1934, Universal), in which Margaret Sullavan and Douglass Montgomery are a poor German couple in Weimar Germany with the specter of Nazism looming. He directed Joan Bennett in Doctors’ Wives (1931) and even worked once with Will Rogers on Young as You Feel (1931). His first of a handful of collaborations with Spencer Tracy was Young America (1932), his last picture with Fox.
After the Hays Code became more authoritative, Borzage signed with Warner Bros. Here he made two Ruby Keeler-Dick Powell military musicals, Flirtation Walk (1934) and Shipmates Forever (1935) and the aforementioned Francis-Brent pictures in 1935. Shipmates Forever is Navy propaganda, but it has its merits in a beautifully shot scene of Navy crewmembers on a battleship singing in unison and in Borzage’s usual insistence on connection, both fraternally and romantically.
In 1936, Frank Borzage was brought on loan to Paramount by none other than Ernst Lubitsch. Lubitsch was now the studio’s production manager, a stint that didn’t last long for the revered filmmaker who liked to have a lot of control on his productions. One of the films he produced was Desire, directed by Borzage and starring Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich. It’s a lovely picture, if a bit uneven. It has Lubitsch’s lightness and glamorous comedy, especially in Cooper’s patsy character, played by the tall actor with a convivial breeze. But the love scenes between Cooper and Dietrich’s jewel-thief character are all Borzage, helping Dietrich to form a new screen persona after leaving behind the seductive sirens she played in the films of Josef von Sternberg. These scenes do mesh, somehow, into an overall delightful story. The most incongruous part is perhaps the ending, which is Code-induced (lame) yet fits into Borzage’s thematic fascination with love and its redemptive power. Though it feels more forcibly thrown in by the former than happily included by the latter. Perhaps the fault is mine, as my first viewing of the film had me used to a Dietrich that doesn’t repent for her sins. That was Dietrich to me and a better Dietrich. But she’s just as wonderful here as a thief changing her ways and her life for the principled, six-foot-three American man. One wonders what Lubitsch would have done with the ending, being the genius he was at skirting the ridiculous censors. For Borzage, strangely, the ending of Desire is still a Borzagian denouement, though awkward, and one that doesn’t quite fit the film but fits Borzage’s angelic view of love nonetheless.
Borzage and Marlene Dietrich
Back at Warner Bros. Borzage made another Dick Powell musical, Hearts Divided (1936), with Marion Davies playing the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte’s brother, Jérôme (Powell). Next he made an Errol Flynn drama, Green Light (1937) before directing History is Made at Night (1937) at United Artists and finally departing to MGM where he would work until 1942. His first films at MGM were two Spencer Tracy dramas Big City (1937) and Mannequin (1937). The latter also brought Borzage and Joan Crawford back together.
The later years of Borzage’s career are not as acclaimed. I’ve yet to see many of them; of the ones I have seen, Three Comrades (1938, MGM, adapted from an Erich Maria Remarque novel and co-written by F. Scott Fitzerald), The Mortal Storm (1940, a stunning anti-Nazi picture banned in Germany and Hitler thereon banning all MGM films), and Moonrise (1948, Republic Pictures, perhaps Borzage’s most sleek and exquisitely directed film), are the best. The Shining Hour (1938) is a mostly forgettable drama, despite having Melvyn Douglas, Joan Crawford, and Margaret Sullavan. TCM’s lineup includes most of his other MGM films - Strange Cargo (1938, with Crawford and Clark Gable), Flight Command (1940), Smilin’ Through (1941, a Jeanette MacDonald musical), and Seven Sweethearts (1942) - and one RKO film in Technicolor, The Spanish Main (1945). The final film that he fully directed, The Big Fisherman (1959), would be distributed by Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures. He died in 1962, shortly after receiving a Lifetime Achievement award from the Directors Guild of America and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Perhaps since he sort of fizzled out in his later years, he is less remembered than Ford, Hawks, Wyler or Wilder. But he belongs right up there with these Hollywood legends. Classical Hollywood was the most romantic era of movies and Frank Borzage, the obsessive master of cinematic love, deserves to be duly remembered for being the best at presenting romantic love as a magical remedy.
My next two posts will focus on Borzage’s two talkie masterworks, Man’s Castle (1933) and History is Made at Night (1937).
