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 7th 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
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