Superman (1978)

 

“You’ll believe a man can fly” was the famous tagline that advertised the film Superman, and you actually do believe it while watching the film. The visual effects had to be top-notch for this story to work, and the filmmakers did an excellent job (for 1978, of course) in keeping the wires invisible to us in the audience. Christopher Reeve plays the caped superhero with a bit of charm and his alter ego, Clark Kent, as if he were a bit of a doofus, so it’s entertaining to witness the actor’s range. His haircut doesn’t necessarily do him any favors, but he certainly fills out the suit nicely, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. The film is loaded with lots of famous faces: Glenn Ford as Pa Kent, Superman’s adoptive father; the great Jackie Cooper as Daily Planet editor Perry White; and perhaps most famously of all, Marlon Brando at Superman’s father back on Krypton. Starting the film with the explosion of Krypton – and a side story about Jor-El (Brando) sentencing three criminals to the Phantom Zone just to set up the sequel – does let the film play just a bit the mythology surrounding Superman. We get to see his discovery by the Kents after his spaceship crashes on Earth when Kal-El was still a baby, and there are a few scenes about what it was like to be a teen (Jeff East) with superpowers. We even get to watch the creation of the Fortress of Solitude. It’s not until Clark arrives in Metropolis and meets Lois Lane, his colleague at the Daily Planet, though, that the film really becomes intriguing, and that’s perhaps my biggest (and, really, only) complaint about the film. It just takes too long to get going. We have to wait almost 48 minutes to get a glimpse of “the” suit, and an hour before the villain even shows up. Gene Hackman plays Lex Luthor, one of the greatest villains in comic book history, but the plot here doesn’t seem quite… ambitious enough? Luthor wants to steal two missiles to set off a catastrophic earthquake along the San Andreas Fault in order to destroy California. Maybe I’m too old-fashioned, but the comic book villains tended to have much bigger evil on their minds, didn’t they? Luthor is assisted by Ned Beatty’s bumbling Otis and Valerie Perrine’s Eve Teschmacher, neither of whom is a fully developed character. Aside from Reeve, the actor who gets the best material is Margo Kidder as Lois Lane. There’s some nice, playful banter between Lois and Superman, and watching her fly alongside the Man of Steel is a nice interlude (although that poem or song or whatever she has to recite in her mind? – ugh). The big moments of special effects – Superman saving a damaged airplane, him reversing time by flying incredibly fast around the world, even the destruction of the planet Krypton – are probably the reasons that most people remember this film fondly. Well, that, and believing a man can, indeed, fly.

Oscar Win: Special Achievement Award for Visual Effects

Other Oscar Nominations: Best Sound, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score

Street Angel (1927-28; 1928-29)

 

Street Angel earns an odd footnote in the history of the Academy Awards. Its star, Janet Gaynor, won an Academy Award for Best Actress in the first year of the Oscars for three films, one of them Street Angel. In the second year of the Oscars, the film itself was nominated for two other awards. Did all of the Oscar voters just forget that they had given the movie an Oscar the year before? Here Gaynor plays a poor young woman in Naples named Angela, who tries to turn to prostitution as a means to make some fast money. She needs the cash for medicine for her mother and for food. She’s caught by the police before she actually succeeds at solicitation, but she escapes and joins a traveling carnival as a way to evade a year in the workhouse. They sure knew how to make plot twists in those days, didn’t they? During her travels, Angela meets a poor but very talented painter, Gino, played by Charles Farrell, Gaynor’s costar from 7^th Heaven. They fall in love, but she spends too much of her time fearing that she will be found by the authorities and have to serve her sentence, and she doesn’t want him to know that she was arrested for solicitation. There’s a subplot involving a lovely painting that Gino does of Angela, but it’s an odd one. For some reason, the guy who buys the painting wants to change it so that it looks like an Old Master, and he can earn far more money reselling it. It’s some form of art fraud, I guess. The performances by Gaynor and Farrell are quite good, but most of the cast is stuck using stereotypical Italian hand gestures, and that gets weary after a while. The camera work in the film is outstanding, particularly when it follows a character through the part of Naples where much of the story is set. There’s also a lot of soft focus throughout the film, which keeps things pretty hazy even when there isn’t a fog settling in over the city. The film also makes very effective use of shadows, such as the larger-than-life ones that populate the entrance to the workhouse. It’s quite understandable why it was nominated for its art direction and cinematography. They’re the strongest parts of the film other than the acting by Gaynor and Farrell. You pretty much can guess how the film will end. Angela’s going to be caught, but there will be a reunion after an initial misunderstanding. Today this film is best known as one of the three for which Gaynor won the first award for Best Actress, but it is also a quite beautiful silent film. If the plot is a bit hackneyed or strange, it might have seemed quite fresh at the time of the film’s initial release.

Oscar Win (1927-28): Best Actress (Janet Gaynor)

Other Oscar Nominations (1928-29): Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography

Best Actress of 1927-28

Three women were chosen as Best Actress candidates in the initial year of the Academy Awards, but five performances were considered, giving the edge to the nominee who starred in three films that year (two of which were nominated for the top film awards). Watching their performances today is interesting because the style of performance for silent films differs so greatly from what contemporary actors do. Here are the nominees:

It’s very difficult to see what prompted Oscar voters to nominate Louise Dresser for her performance as Mama Pleznik in A Ship Comes In. Today it would most likely be considered a supporting performance since much of the film is about her character’s husband Peter, and even then it wouldn’t likely get much awards consideration. The film concerns a family of European immigrants coming to the United States and their integration into American society. Peter Pleznik (played with a great deal of vigor and joy by Rudolph Schildkraut, father of future Oscar winner Joseph Schildkraut) is optimistic about almost everything in his new home country. He makes a friend quickly, he gets a job soon after the family arrives, and he even feels like his son is becoming a real American by joining the military. Meanwhile, Dresser’s Mama sews clothes and bakes cakes and has nothing much of her own to do plot-wise. She does get to react to the news that her son is now a soldier, but seeing him in uniform just makes her walk very slowly and stay rather stone-faced. It’s an unexpected acting choice. When she runs after him as he leaves their home, she does hug and kiss him intently. All of that emotional work is shown as shadows on the wall, though, so we get no direct representation of Mama’s feelings. Likewise, when her husband is released from jail after being convicted of attempting to kill a judge – it’s just too preposterous a storyline to explain more fully than that – she tears up a bit when he returns home, but again the main reaction seems to be moving more slowly than usual. Her big scene is supposed to be when she learns that her son has been killed in battle, but she apparently hasn’t learned enough English in the years that they’ve been in the U.S., so even that realization becomes more muted. It’s similar to when she tries to convince the trial judge who sentences her husband that Peter couldn’t have done anything wrong. The judge cannot understand her, again making it seem as though she doesn’t speak English. When she buys a wreath for her son, the camera focuses on the woman who’s selling her the wreath. We mostly get the back of Dresser’s head during a scene that could have been a real showcase of emotions. The filmmakers just don’t do Dresser any favors; her actions are mostly limited to reactions to what others have done or said. I can’t truly say that it’s a bad performance; it’s not even enough of a performance to warrant much of an evaluation.

Janet Gaynor plays Diane, a poor young woman in early 20^th Century Paris, in the film 7^th Heaven. I’ve read many descriptions of her character that claim Diane is a prostitute, but I didn’t really notice much evidence of that in the movie. Gaynor plays Diane as naïve and weak at the start of the film, as she is under the control of her abusive sister Nana. When she is almost beaten to death by her sister, she’s rescued by Charles Farrell’s sewer worker Chico. He takes her to his apartment to save her from being arrested, and their love story begins to develop. At first, she’s very tentative and sad and hopeless around him, and he’s very enthusiastic and optimistic and loud. She wrings her hands a lot – I mean, a lot – during the first half of the movie, so I guess that’s supposed to indicate just how nervous and afraid she might be. It’s really Gaynor’s eyes that show her changes in character, though, not her hands. As Diane falls more in love with Chico and becomes braver, even her posture changes and her eyes show her feelings more directly. Gaynor’s big scene in the film comes near the end when Diane learns that Chico may have been killed in World War I. She’s able to convey both anger and sadness simultaneously in that scene, and her joy in learning that he’s still alive is clear. Gaynor was quite tiny next to Farrell in their scenes together, but she’s the one who got the awards attention for this performance and two others in the same year.

In her second nominated role, Gaynor plays Angela, a poor woman who’s charged with solicitation in Street Angel. She’s desperate for money to help her ailing mother, and when she sees how easily the local hooker, Lisetta (Natalie Kingston), makes money, Angela thinks she will give it a try. However, she’s terrible at it. None of the men she approaches seem interested – or even aware that she’s coming on to them. However, she swipes some food and gets charged with robbery while soliciting. She escapes custody on her way to the workhouse, though, and falls in with a carnival and later meets a talented but poor painter. For much of the plot, though, Gaynor’s Angela is afraid of being caught by the police. This leads to many sequences showing her worried face. She also tries to keep from being attracted to “vagabond” painter Gino (Farrell again), and her behavior is almost childlike at times in her attempts to get him to leave her alone. Her tantrum when he accidentally tears her costume is hysterical. Gaynor gets a range of emotions to portray in this film, and that ability to convey so many feelings was such a strength during the silent era. This may be the least challenging of her three roles for which she won the Oscar, but she still manages to combine an interesting physicality (Angela performs a balancing act while with the carnival) with that expressive face of hers.

The performance by Gaynor that is truly a revelation is as The Wife in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. As I have written elsewhere, I didn't quite understand her charm or reputation in A Star Is Born, a film for which she would be nominated a decade later, but I get it here. She's shy and gentle and sweet. She can demonstrate great naivete, but she can also convey her growing knowledge of her husband’s plans to kill her. She shows great love for her husband in one scene and tremendous fear of him in another. She is also able to demonstrate how she begins to forgive him after they spend time together in the city and away from their home. When she goes missing during their return boat ride, you can also develop a sense of her own strength and ingenuity. Gaynor has a distinct kind of vulnerability that serves her well here. She seems almost childlike in the early scenes of the film, but you watch an evolution in her character as she gains a clearer sense of how she and her husband are going to be reunited and happy. Her character’s name (title, really) of The Wife makes her more enigmatic, perhaps, but it also allows us as viewers to project some pretty strong emotions onto Gaynor’s characterization. She’s not just a wide-eyed girl; she’s a tougher woman than she initially appears.

Gloria Swanson takes on the title role in Sadie Thompson with all the gusto and ferocity she can muster. It’s a magnificent performance, one of the best of the silent era of films. Her Sadie has arrived on the island of Pago Pago after fleeing San Francisco under suspicious circumstances. The film, especially in the character of Lionel Barrymore’s Alfred Davidson, suggests that she is a prostitute on the run from a potential arrest. She’s reportedly on her way to a new job in Apia but gets stuck in Pago Pago for at least a week and decides to have some fun while waiting for the ship to be ready. She flirts with a group of Marines who are stationed on the island and seems to fall in love with one in particular, Sgt. O’Hara. She spends her time hanging out in her room, entertaining (male) guests, playing jazz records, smoking, and chewing gum. No one can chew a piece of gum like Swanson; even though it’s a silent film, you can hear the smack of that gum chewing. She also walks with a deliciously confident, sexy swagger in the film’s first half. When Sadie inevitably comes into conflict with Davidson, the pompous reformer who tries to get her to go back to San Francisco to face her punishment, Swanson shows the discomfort and fear in Sadie’s eyes. She also knows how to deliver a slow burn with what we call “side eye.” Two scenes, in particular, elevate Swanson’s performance. She throws an epic tantrum when Davidson convinces the governor of the island to force Sadie to return to the United States. Later, she seemingly goes mad when, trapped in her room due to the torrential rain, she begins to imagine being jailed. After her supposed conversion to being a good, moral (read: Christian) person, she holds her body differently. Sadie now slouches, almost cowering when she comes into contact with anyone else, especially Davidson, a sharp contrast from the woman who left the ship at the beginning of Sadie Thompson. In many ways, the character of Sadie Thompson is an actress in her own right, as you find out at the film’s end, and Swanson takes full advantage of the opportunity to play the powerful range of emotions the movie demands. This performance ranks alongside her Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard and demonstrates just why Swanson was one of the greatest stars and actors ever captured on film.

Oscar Winner: With three solid performances, Gaynor won the first award for Best Actress. Find an actress nowadays who could do what is asked of Gaynor in 7^th Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise. It’s quite a feat, and she must have had an edge by starring in three films.

My Choice: Gloria Swanson in Sadie Thompson gives one of the greatest performances of the silent era. Here’s someone who understood the power that comes with silent film acting. Swanson would never win an Academy Award despite being nominated multiple times. I think she should have been the first winner.

The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (1928-29)

 

The Hollywood Revue, also known as The Hollywood Revue of 1929, is one of the strangest nominees for Best Picture in the history of the Academy Awards. The film has no plot, no clear connections between its various scenes at all. It is, literally, what the title suggests: a revue. Various stars and novelty acts perform as if this were a vaudeville show. I suppose this was a clever way for MGM to test its newfangled sound equipment for the movies it would make in the future, but unless you’re intrigued by how Hollywood started making the transition out of the silent era, this film really just serves as a showcase for a lot of now-forgotten performers – a time capsule, if you will.

Jack Benny, who had a very long career as a comic master, and Conrad Nagel, an actor who is not as well known today as he should be, serve as sort of ersatz masters of ceremonies, but here’s the thing: they don’t actually introduce that many acts. From time to time, they show up to talk to a star in what is really more like elevated awards show banter, and then a different act will follow without giving us any sense of who these people are. For example, the great Buster Keaton shows up at one point and performs a very energetic if erratic dance dressed as either a harem girl or Cleopatra (complete with a sort of asp), but no one mentions that it’s Buster Keaton! That sequence also features a sort of undulating visual effect to make it appear that Keaton is performing underwater. I have no idea what is or was going on, but I was fascinated.

The opening dance number actually seems to be part of a minstrel act but without blackface, thankfully. Instead, one of the first camera tricks makes the image into its negative, sort of like watching a dance through a malfunctioning x-ray. We go from the positive image to the negative and then back again. It’s an intriguing choice to begin a musical film, but it’s not consistent with the content of the song or with the dance itself, so it doesn’t really contribute a great deal to our understanding of the film. It’s just a cute effect, and it doesn’t appear anywhere else in the film.

Similarly, twice during the film, performers either shrink or grow bigger thanks to camera effects. The first is when Nagel and singer Charles King (another performer whose star had dimmed since the early sound era) are talking about how actors cannot really sing as well as “true” singers can, only to have Nagel start singing “You Were Meant for Me” (a song associated with King and The Broadway Melody) to Anita Page, one of King’s co-stars from The Broadway Melody. King seems to shrink to tiny size as a result of his embarrassment for having been so wrong about actors like Nagel. Of course, the irony is that Nagel’s voice is dubbed. It’s not actually Nagel singing, it’s King himself!

The second time this effect gets used involves Bessie Love, another co-star of The Broadway Melody, Oscar’s second Best Picture winner. She’s so small, you see, that she can fit inside Benny’s pocket. She walks into his hand and, when he places her on the floor, she grows to her normal size – right before our very eyes. Camera tricks like this had been a staple of films for decades by this point, so the addition of sound doesn’t really make these moments any more spectacular than they might otherwise have been. By the way, Love then begins what can only be described as a very energetic, acrobatic dance with a troupe of male dancers that must have left her as exhausted as she pretends to be at its end.

The Hollywood Revue does feature some very good performances. Joan Crawford sings “Got a Feeling for You” and dances the Charleston in a way that reminds you just what an all-around talent she was. Her version of dancing is perhaps more, um, muscular than you might think is necessary, but she had a star quality even this early in her career. Unfortunately, the film’s camera can’t seem to keep her in frame. Her feet are sometimes not visible when she’s dancing, and the top of her head is not fully visible when she sits atop a piano at the end of her number. I will readily admit that these deficits could be the result of the print that I watched, but since so much of the version I saw had these kinds of mistakes, it’s hard to believe that they weren’t present in the best possible print.

Marie Dressler does a comic number dressed as a queen, and she’s just as prone to overreacting (or overacting) here as she ever was. Polly Moran is deadpan funny as a princess in that sequence, by the way. Laurel and Hardy, in their first appearance in a sound film, perform a magic act filled with comic mishaps, such as Laurel accidentally revealing how a trick works. Even Marion Davis appears, dressed as a bellhop amidst a group of male dancers in military costumes. Davies doesn’t have the strongest singing voice and she’s mostly an okay dancer, but she displays a great deal of enthusiasm. One of the most fun performances is an adagio dance with three men and a single woman. That woman is very strong and tough. She gets thrown around a lot and always seems to be up to the task.

Several of the musical numbers are reminiscent of the Ziegfeld Follies. The film’s “second act” begins with what is called a “Tableau of Jewels,” and it is staged like a hybrid of a Follies act and a Busby Berkeley number, with rotating sets and women in skimpy costumes. By the time a dancer (Beth Laemmle?) emerges from a large clam shell in a costume that barely has her nipples covered, you realize why the movie industry came under such scrutiny for its racy content back in the 1920s and 1930s.

The film features some very strange performances. Cliff Edwards (who was sometimes billed as “Ukelele Ike”) performs in front of a chorus of people (allegedly) playing ukeleles too, but to characterize what he does as singing would be, to put it kindly, a bit of an overstatement. This isn’t the Edwards voice that was used to such great effect as Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio and “When You Wish Upon a Star.” No, this is more like high-spirited caterwauling. Then there’s the appearance of William Haines, an early star who left Hollywood rather than pretend not to be gay. He does some sort of strange “comic” skit involving him tearing off parts of Jack Benny’s tuxedo to no apparent purpose. Then a comedy duo named Dane and Arthur show up, dressed for some unknown reason in sailor suits, and proceed to mess up Benny’s performance by trying to unroll a carpet.

I did like the novelty song “Lon Chaney’s Gonna Get You If You Don’t Watch Out,” a tribute to the great star of many horror films, but it’s staging is just bizarre. It begins with a group of ten women who are in bed. The singer Gus Edwards (not to be confused with Cliff) shows up and the pajama-clad women all gather around him to listen and be… frightened? Then various characters in monster masks and costumes, some of them clearly roles that Chaney played, enter and an unusual dance sequence begins that at one point features overhead shots like a Busby Berkely number. It’s such a shift from the other numbers and skits in the film that it really does seem out of place.

Perhaps the oddest (and worst) series of scenes, however, involves two trios of performers. First up are Charles King, Gus Edwards, and Cliff Edwards doing a number called “Charlie, Gus, and Ike.” They sing and play a gigantic xylophone and then start performing as stereotypical Italians (with Edwards in drag). It’s truly an awful song. Then Marie Dressler, Polly Moran, and Bessie Love, show up and sing a song called “Marie, Polly, and Bess,” which – as you might have guessed – is similar in content and quality to the song done by the men’s trio. Then both trios merge to sing together. It’s an unwatchable mess by that point.

The largest issue with Hollywood Revue is, however, the camera. It’s very static. Silent films had already mastered the moving camera, but to accommodate all of the new sound equipment and to reduce the noise generated by camera movement, films like this seem to have nailed the camera to a single spot and just filmed whatever was in front of it. This leads to a very dull series of choices. We see a few images in close up and a few where the shot is mid-range, but the most dominant view is the wide shot that allows for all of the dancers, for example, to be on screen at the same time. The most daring camera work comes in the final sequence when it pans from one star to the next so that we can see each individual for a second or two on screen. That’s about it for innovation. Of course, you could argue that having the camera remain stationary helps to replicate for the audience the experience of being in a theater watching vaudeville show. I’m not confident that was the intention, though.

Aside from being an early sound film, Hollywood Revue is also one of the first sound films to feature color instead of being completely black-and-white. A couple of sequences were shot in an early form of Technicolor. The first features movie stars Norma Shearer and John Gilbert in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and reciting the beautiful language of Shakespeare. Then Lionel Barrymore, playing the part of their “director” for the scene, tells them that the New York “office” doesn’t like the antiquated language, so they try it again in contemporary slang. There’s even a moment involving pig Latin! By the way, Gilbert sounds just fine; his voice is not at all high-pitched like the rumors have suggested. Why he didn’t become as big a star in the sound era as he had been in silent films was certainly not truly due to his vocal qualities. The next color sequence involves King singing “Orange Blossom Time.” This number includes a sort of ballet although it really seems more like the Rockettes than a ballet at times. That’s not a criticism, by the way; the dancers are very talented. It also features a group of women in swings descending from the heavens, their reflections gleaming in the shine of a highly polished floor. It’s quite an effect.

The final sequence of the film is also shot in color. The whole cast lines up in front of an ark (for some inexplicable reason) to perform “Singing in the Rain,” which would become the unofficial anthem of MGM over the years. They’re all wearing raincoats, but not all of them are doing a very good job of lip synching. We start with a wide shot of everyone before the camera starts panning to closeups of the individual faces. Then, as has happened throughout the film, the curtains close, ending our theatrical experience. Apparently, Hollywood Revue was filmed after hours so it wouldn’t interfere with any of the movies the stars were in during the day. I’m not certain it was truly worth the extra hours it took, and how it was deemed worthy of Best Picture consideration is certainly a head-scratcher.

Oscar Nomination: Outstanding Picture

Alien (1979)

 

Alien happens to be one of The Boyfriend’s favorite movies. He’s seen it dozens of times (so I’ve seen it many times as well), and he’s seen every film in the series (so far). We had the chance in early 2024 to see it in a theater for the first time, and seeing it on the big screen just reinforces my opinion of it being one of the most tense and claustrophobic horror/science fiction films of all time. Seven people are on board the spaceship Nostromo coming back to Earth when they receive a distress signal from an isolated – and, it turns out, quite inhospitable – planet. They detour to help and find some very bizarre architecture and a ton of large, mysterious eggs, one of which opens up and reaches into the helmet of John Hurt’s Kane and into his body. Thus, we are introduced to the title menace, at this point in the form of what’s become known as a “face hugger.” A bit later, after a false sense of security gets built up, we get to meet the “chest bursting” form of the alien, also thanks to Hurt and one of the grossest scenes in film, and I mean that in a good way. Things don’t exactly get better after that, as we in the audience start to watch a space version of “And Then There Was One.” Each member of the crew but one meets a particularly grisly ending, and although we now think of Sigourney Weaver as a movie star, when this film was made we had no sense that her Ripley would become such an iconic and heroic figure. Thanks to Weaver’s fearless performance, we now have one of the greatest female badasses ever to appear in a science fiction/horror film. At the time of filming, Hurt and Tom Skerritt (who plays Dallas) were perhaps the best-known actors in the cast, and the rest (Ian Holm, Harry Dean Stanton, Veronica Cartwright, Yaphet Kotto) were respected character actors. Everyone is well chosen here, and their group dynamic is one of the highlights of the movie. Aside from the monster itself – whose appearance is gradually revealed as the movie progresses until we get to see the full extent of its spectacular horrible appearance – the other truly great attribute of Alien is its production design. The spaceship is a maze of dark interiors, the depiction of which is clearly heavily indebted to the artwork of H.R. Giger (as is the monster’s look). The film’s visuals are also heavily influenced by 2001: A Space Odyssey; only two areas are brightly lit, and they’re communal spaces – for a reason. There are enough plot twists and shocking reveals aboard the Nostromo to make Alien interesting even if you’ve seen it dozens of times, and the fact that it keeps spawning sequels and prequels is just more evidence of how much of a cultural impact it’s had.

Oscar Win: Best Visual Effects

Other Oscar Nomination: Best Art Direction-Set Decoration

Best Picture of 1927-28

 

The Winner: Wings? Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans? Both of them?

The Other Nominees: Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, The Crowd, The Racket, and 7^th Heaven

The Academy Awards had two categories for “Best Picture” in their first year. One was called “Outstanding Picture,” and the three nominees were The Racket, 7^th Heaven, and Wings. Wings, a tale of the friendship between fighter pilots in World War II, won. The second category was “Best Unique and Artistic Production,” and the nominees for that award were Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, The Crowd, and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Sunrise, the story of a couple finding their love for each other despite horrific events, won in that category. The designation of Best Unique and Artistic Production was deleted after the first year, and the Academy, in its infinite wisdom, now claims that Wings was the winner of the first Best Picture Oscar. Sure. I’m still going to consider all six movies, however, since they did choose two pictures to win different awards for “best” or “outstanding” that year.

My Choice: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans remains one of the most accomplished and powerful films of the silent era. Wings is great entertainment, certainly, but Sunrise represents the greater artistic achievement in so many ways.

7th Heaven (1927-28)

 

The film 7^th Heaven has a lot going on in its almost-two-hour run time. It’s a love story between two members of the lower classes in Paris in the early part of the 20^th century, but it’s also a war movie set during World War I. It’s also a commentary on making oneself better through hard work, the possibility that we might have to improve our lot in life. With all of that going on, the film still manages to be visually stunning and quite coherent in its characterizations of the poor and so-called downtrodden.

The two central characters are Chico (played by Charles Farrell) and Diane (Janet Gaynor, one of three award-winning roles she played that year). Chico is a sewer worker, but he has aspirations to be a street washer. He keeps telling everyone, himself included, that he’s a “very remarkable fellow.” Many online sources claim that Diane is a prostitute, but there’s little direct evidence of that in the film itself. She’s certainly poor and under the tyrannical control of her sister Nana (Gladys Brockwell, enjoying playing the part of a villain perhaps a bit too much). Nana terrorizes Diane and frequently beats her harshly with a whip.

Nana is particularly brutal to Diane after their rich aunt and uncle reappear after years away in a foreign country. The couple will take care of the girls, but the uncle wants to ensure that they’ve kept themselves “clean.” I think we all know what that means, but Diane cannot lie. They’ve not been “clean,” so perhaps that is where the implication of her being a prostitute comes from? In retaliation for losing them all the family riches, Nana beats her sister even after the young woman tries to escape to the street. That’s when Chico intervenes and rescues Diane. I suppose that’s what filmmakers of the day would have considered a “meet cute.”

Diane – who is at this point completely hopeless and full of despair – tries to kill herself with Chico’s knife, but he stops her. He also prevents her from being arrested by the police by claiming that she’s his wife. He takes her to his apartment so that she doesn’t wind up in jail like her sister, but he keeps warning her that she cannot stay with him forever. In his mind, this is only a temporary arrangement, at least at first. I think moviegoers back then were probably already guessing that the two of them were destined to be together. It’s not necessarily a new story although the setting and the particular characters are certainly distinctive.

Their journey to his attic apartment is where you can begin to appreciate the quality of the cinematography in 7^th Heaven. The camera follows them as they climb the stairs, and we get to see the different floors as they rise in the building. It’s a masterful pairing of cinematography and production design to provide such a moment. Chico’s apartment looks out over the rooftops of Paris. As he puts it, he lives “near the stars.”

Despite what you might expect, especially considering that most reviewers think she’s a prostitute, they don’t sleep together that first night – he’s quite the gentleman, as they say – but she makes him breakfast and helps him get dressed the next morning. You can tell that she’s already smitten with him. We watch as they slowly begin to acknowledge their attraction to each other. There’s a lovely moment when she mends his coat and then puts its sleeves around her as she’s sitting in a chair. It’s just charming, and Gaynor’s large expressive eyes make the scene even more charming. We get to see their love for each other increase until he causes her to cry happy tears when he lets her stay with him. Chico brings her flowers one day and a lovely dress, which turns out to be a wedding gown. He finally says he loves her after seeing how beautiful she is in the dress.

However, here’s where the narrative takes quite the sharp turn. He and his neighbor/co-worker have to go to war. Like, immediately. As in, the soldiers are starting to march through the streets of Paris, and you have to go join them or you’ll be considered disloyal. It’s a bit of a stunner to see how quickly the film pivots from this marvelous happy moment in their dismal lives. They “marry” in his apartment before he leaves at 11 a.m., and he promises that no matter where he is, he will pause at 11 every day to “talk” to her. I guess people used to say things like that when they were being separated by war.

The intercutting of the scenes of him at war with scenes of her at a munitions factory makes for some interesting juxtapositions. He’s being rather heroic, and she’s become stronger and less fearful after driving her awful sister away by beating Nana with her own whip. She’s also managed to fend off a soldier who keeps hitting on her at the factory. When it’s 11 a.m., we get to see their images superimposed as they speak to each other just as he had promised. It doesn’t matter that he’s in a foxhole and she’s in the factory; his fellow soldiers and her coworkers all know what’s going on at 11 each day. Visually, we’re able to see just how connected and close they remain emotionally even though they are far apart geographically.

7^th Heaven opts for somewhat of a Hollywood ending for Chico and Diane. She’s been told that he’s died in the war, but she refuses to believe it. When enough people tell her and she starts to think she’s lost him, she breaks down in tears. She’s sad and angry, and Gaynor gets quite the emotional scene. It’s probably a moment that like that clinched the Best Actress Oscar for this role. Of course, he arrives at their apartment at just that precise moment, and the lighting makes him seem almost ghost-like (or Christ-like, you pick). He’s alive, yes, but blinded. However, he claims that he won’t stay that way long because, as he’s stated repeatedly, he’s a “very remarkable fellow.” Having a catchphrase like that can do wonders for a somewhat underdeveloped character. It perhaps explains why Farrell tends to overplay his lines while Gaynor is much more subdued and subtle.

The film’s look, especially the scenes in the streets of Paris, is clearly influenced by German Expressionism. It was a common style at the time, as evidenced by some of the other films nominated for Oscars in that first year. The print that I watched did not seem to be fully restored, but you could tell that some of the images are almost as beautiful as those in Sunrise, another film from the same year starring Gaynor. Unfortunately, the version I saw also had a score that used the song “Manhattan” (“We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island too…”) throughout the movie. Since the film is set in Paris, I kept getting distracted by music associated with another city and another continent. Apparently, 7^th Heaven was released with an original score and sound effects, but I certainly hope it wasn’t the one that I listened to.

Oscar Wins: Best Actress (Janet Gaynor), Best Directing of a Dramatic Picture (Frank Borzage), and Best Writing/Adaptation

Other Nominations: Outstanding Picture and Best Art Direction