Director: Frank Borzage
Ernest Hemingway famously detested this 1932 adaptation of his 1929 masterpiece. It is a film that takes liberties with the text not only in changing certain narrative elements, but disrupting the tone of Hemingway’s novel almost entirely–gone is the ugliness, with the brutal, defeatist description of the retreat rendered as a forgettable montage. It is understandable why director Frank Borzage was assigned to the task of directing the adaptation in that Hemingway’s novel dealt with both melodramatics and the sort of love affair that temporarily puts the rest of the world on hold, but Borzage’s typical third acts couldn’t be any different from Hemingway’s climax. On its own terms, however, A Farewell to Arms has some charms, even if it is one of Borzage’s weaker pictures from the period. There’s little sense of place and contextualization–Borzage seems bored of the war element, robbing the conflict of its sense of urgency. Gary Cooper strives to play vulnerable in the film’s final act, but he struggles with the material–three years later he would deal with similar emotions more effectively in Peter Ibbetson. But Borzage and cinematographer Charles Lang’s images are splendid, both doing justice to the actors’ performances with close-ups and long takes and also creating beautifully expressionistic tableaus (the last shot is particularly rich with feeling).
Director: Frank Borzage
In the climactic sequence of Strange Cargo, a hardened criminal (Clark Gable) is about to let a man die (Ian Hunter) in order to ensure his freedom. At the last possible moment, he discovers that the man he is sacrificing is God, and that only through his repentance can he ultimately find the peace that he’s looking for. Hunter’s positioning on a floating piece of debris as if he were on the crucifix is as obtuse an image as any in director Frank Borzage’s filmography, but Strange Cargo nonetheless does show a tremendous evolution in his themes from his earlier pictures. Whereas he dealt with a number of suffering romantics who finally accepted that a true, pure love denotes sacrifice and takes precedence over all other material matters in his 30s films, Strange Cargo suggests a more complete personal reformation. That is, Gable can’t be saved purely through his relationship with Joan Crawford–in fact, in the final moments, he’s stripped of her. Instead, Hunter’s Christ figure is the catalyst for his own sense of personal redemption, his acceptance of his place in the world and a greater understanding of how he fits into it. As is typical of Borzage, the major characters in Strange Cargo are driven nearly to death before their repentance is complete, echoing Borzage’s running theme that such personal harmonies (whether those be romantic or those involving one’s relationship to the world) can bring one to a state of transcendence.
Director: Frank Borzage
In Mannequin, Spencer Tracy plays a humble, lonely man who has much to learn about what it means to be in a Frank Borzage picture. He first encounters Joan Crawford at a restaurant where he asks the newlywed to dance. Not only is he taken by her beauty, but he is amazed by the type of love that she’s capable of–when the first song is over, his response is to throw another nickel in the jukebox to prolong his time with the woman. His social status is his only means of seeing the world and thus his only means of courtship, as later he invites her to fancy parties in hopes of seeing her again. Just before he kisses her, he reflects, “I never knew anything could mean so much to anybody up until now.” That Tracy is rocked by Crawford’s sacrifices and her purity says much about Borzage’s worldview, being that love takes a precedence over everything, even poverty. While Crawford leaving her working class husband for a rich man might make a counterargument to this theme, it is fitting that Tracy’s wealth vanishes from him by the end–it’s a trade off between profit and romance. Though considered a minor film in Borzage’s rich oeuvre, Mannequin is a concise articulation of his philosophy, a pleasant championing of his themes. Crawford is expectedly well-cast as a working girl, and Tracy gives a very different performance than the one he gave for Borzage in Man’s Castle, here playing a gentle student to Crawford’s selfless forfeiture to love.
Director: Frank Borzage
Lovers in Frank Borzage films are always confronted with (and ultimately overcome) adversity, but Big City takes an interesting spin on the trope. Luise Rainer plays a Russian immigrant who is to be unfairly deported by politicians trying to sweep an act of violence under the rug. In hiding, she stays with her husband (Spencer Tracy) and his friends for a short while before she eventually gives herself in. That is, only through her ultimate sacrifice–succumbing to her deportation–can the outside world be restored to normalcy. Borzage and cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg shoot their eventual reunion as if Rainer is on her deathbed waiting for a true love’s kiss to restore her to health. As absurd and schizophrenic as the screenplay can be (credited to Dore Schary and Hugo Butler with an original story by Norman Krasna), the visuals often carry the film and there are a handful of memorable sequences. An early birthday scene for Rainer is rendered with high contrast shadows, with the only light on screen provided by faces illuminated by candles. It’s an inspired choice for a joyous occasion–the scene carries a melancholic tone, as if the lovers are intuitively bracing for the conflict that they’ll be tested with.
Director: Frank Borzage
In a Frank Borzage picture, romance is a life-force, an unmitigated drive, the unconquerable. In The Shining Hour, Borzage uses Margaret Sullavan (his muse at the time) to convey both the bravery of being a lover and the inherent tragedy of it. Both Sullavan and Melvyn Douglas are cast as characters who are positive in living and love without fear, harshly juxtaposed with the ever-doubting Joan Crawford and Robert Young, who are always searching for something more. Their capacity for love is almost holy, but in Sullavan’s case the wear of selfless love is etched in her desperate face. In a beautiful moment, she notices that her husband, Young, has been flirting with Crawford, so she takes the time to adjust his tie–a gesture that says, “look at how much I care for you, look at how much you need me.” While the picture is relatively neglected in Borzage’s career as a simple soap opera, it is one of his purest and most emotionally honest looks at romance. Lovers aren’t kept apart by external circumstances, rather by the very fact that one partner doesn’t believe quite as much as the other does.
Director: Frank Borzage
A staple sequence in many of Frank Borzage’s romantic dramas is the first date–the dance in the closed-down restaurant in History Is Made at Night, the night of romance following a meet-cute in Living on Velvet. What distinguishes Stranded is just how dreadful the date goes, with the script emphasizing Kay Francis’ commitment to her work above all and George Brent’s growing frustration with the lack of attention he’s receiving. It’s an unusual episode for Borzage, one that almost argues that love doesn’t, in fact, conquer all–at least not yet (in the end, this is indeed Borzage). As the engineer, Brent is an unlikely hero for the genre. He’s a practical, conservative man with very little interest in the essential goodness of human beings (which creates the key conflict between he and his lover). Although his inevitable transformation is a contrived one, it’s interesting to see a movie of this period in which the woman holds her ground until the man is accepting of her chosen career path and independence. Besides the romance, Borzage invests a lot of screentime into detailing the gritty realism of the Depression (as he does in After Tomorrow), with his interest in juxtaposing romanticism with harsh realism exemplified early on when a tangential look at an adorable child is followed immediately by an old man committing suicide.
Director: Frank Borzage
No filmmaker has ever been better than Frank Borzage at showing people fall in love. Oft-cited as one of the great romanticists of classical Hollywood cinema, Borzage created lovers that were unconquerable–their unions were holy things, beacons of hope that pervaded throughout even the most dire of circumstances. Living on Velvet, a neglected masterwork, features one of the very best romantic meetings of its era. At a high society party, two people engaging in their own middling smalltalk happen to meet eyes from across the room. Borzage shoots their glances in medium close-up, editing back and forth to create the tension. To punctuate the glances, as well as to illustrate the distance between the two (a distance which the audience begs to be broken), he then has his camera pan back-and-forth between the lovers not once, but twice–a rather aggressive move for the genre in this period. The lust-filled encounter is immediately followed by a nightly excursion, the kind that he would later perfect with History Is Made at Night. Every supporting player disappears, and all the audience is left with is the lovers and the few strangers (such as a carriage driver) who bear witness to their chemistry. It is surprising that the picture isn’t held in higher regard among Borzage scholars (although few have poor things to say about it)–it is profoundly illustrative of his talents, among the most Borzage of Borzage pictures. Casting George Brent as the male lead was certainly a hinderance (a bland actor with a bad habit of appearing in otherwise great movies), but he does have a sizzling chemistry with co-star Kay Francis that is unmistakable.
Director: Frank Borzage
F. Scott Fitzgerald worked in Hollywood during the latter half of the 1930s out of financial necessity. While he was most certainly one of the foremost American novelists of his or any time, screenwriting wasn’t a medium that he took a particular liking to, nor was it one that he found much success in. In the end, his only completed screen credit was his adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades, which was reportedly heavily rewritten by both Edward E. Paramore Jr. and producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz. While there is something distinctly literary about the dialogue in its unusual lyricism (Franchot Tone, in particular, is given a number of anti-war polemics to recite), it is precisely that cadence which provides the film its most genuinely affecting moments, appealingly meshing with director Frank Borzage’s grand romantic sensibilities. While Remarque’s novel was primarily a criticism of the Nazi Party, the screen version is much more about not only a country in recovery in the shadow of war, but it is most certainly in line with Borzage’s melodramatic tradition established in such greats as Seventh Heaven and City Girl. Star Margaret Sullavan, who would only appear in sixteen movies total over the course of her relatively brief career, is marvelous as the fallen aristocrat who falls for the least cynical of titular trifecta, played by Robert Taylor. What is particularly rare about the picture is how delicately it deals with friendship in addition to romantic love. The camaraderie between the males is expected, but what is most welcome is the asexual friendship that develops between Tone and Sullavan, who share just as many scenes together as the true lovers do.
Director: Frank Borzage
Two lovers are forced to continue putting off their marriage plans in After Tomorrow, a Depression-era drama from the great romanticist Frank Borzage. Charles Farrell, who worked frequently with Borzage in the late 1920s and early 1930s, was often paired with the incomparable Janet Gaynor, however this picture sees Marian Nixon give her best Gaynor impression as the love interest. She is well-suited to the task, both exuding the weariness of the lower class and, in spite of it all, an unquenchable sexual desire for her man, as seen in the film’s most erotic moment in which Farrell teases her with a kiss as cinematographer James Wong Howe backlights the lovers in an idyllic glow. Coming between the couple is their mothers – his, overbearing; hers, carrying an affair – which proves the perfect obstacle for a picture so in tune with a natural sense of community and familial relations. Even the lowliest of Borzage’s heroes were often depicted as being remarkably courageous and sprightly – Gaynor in Street Angel, as an example – however After Tomorrow‘s cast is made up of characters who aren’t terribly smart or ambitious beyond their practical desires. This is Borzage at his most earthbound; a social realist drama with an uncharacteristic pragmatism in its handling of marriage.
Director: Frank Borzage
Frank Borzage, the great romanticist of American cinema, is at his most unabashed in the enchanting History Is Made at Night. Concluding with – what else? – a Titanic-like disaster, the film is a patchwork of genre extremes, achieving a pinnacle of melodramatic invention. Jean Arthur plays the wife of the sadistic Colin Clive, who jealously seeks to frame her for infidelity after she files for divorce. By chance, a Parisian headwaiter overhears the set-up and poses as a jewel thief in order to rescue the girl without being mistaken as her lover. This is one of those pictures in which a single night of romance must be of such an intensity that it can quench the audience’s lustful thirst before depriving them of the final consummation. It works. As the pair dances in a vacant restaurant, Arthur flings off her heels in what is surely one of the most memorably liberating, sexual moments in all of classic Hollywood cinema. Arthur and Boyer are marvelous together, but a word should be said for Colin Clive, whose performance has been criticized as being excessive. Though he might be a monster, C. Graham Baker’s script wisely ensures the audience that he does, in fact, love Arthur, albeit perversely so. Watch the way that he nearly strangles Arthur while looking for a kiss, or the fear in his eyes as he suspects the worst of her fate. He is not merely the villain, but the antithesis of Boyer’s lover, developing a firm juxtaposition between romantic love and obsession. This would be Clive’s penultimate performance before his tragic death in 1937.
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