Lucky Star (Borzage,1929)
My Summer Movies # 9
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In October of 1915, Motion Pictures magazine wrote that as an actor Borzage “has the reputation of having better control of facial expression than any other screen artist before the public today.” That same year he directed his first film, a two-reeler called Pitch O’ Chance, in which he also co-starred as he would continue to do for the next two years while also directing himself. As a director, the face assumes for Borzage (as it does for so many filmmakers) a privileged role, what Sarris has termed Borzage’s “emotional Eldorado.” (p. 140) As already noted, these faces are most often beautiful ones and the camera is as likely to be taken with male beauty as it is with female: Gary Cooper in A Farewell to Arms as much as Loretta Young in Man’s Castle (1933), Alan Curtis in Mannequin (1938) as much as Margaret Sullavan in Little Man, What Now? (1934). Borzage’s tendency in filming the face is one which aims towards an effect of slight immobility, the features not so much in motion and continually connoting thought as they are poised between movement and stasis, between the expression of emotion and the withdrawal of it. The frequent close-ups of Janet Gaynor in Seventh Heaven and Margaret Sullavan in Little Man, What Now? often seem suspended above the direct unfolding of the action, assuming a form of portraiture of infinitesimal movement specific to the cinema. Through the act of looking into these faces, the eyes often assume a central role, becoming the culminating moment in facial contemplation, from the large and sad liquid eyes of ZaSu Pitts in Lazybones to the ravaged beauty of Gail Russell’s equally liquid eyes in Moonrise (1948). At the end of History Is Made at Night (1937), Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur are going down on what they believe to be a sinking ocean liner. As they gaze at one another’s faces, as though attempting to take them in for one final time, Arthur asks Boyer, “Did you always look like this, your eyes?”
It is inevitable, then, that these beautiful and impassive faces of Borzage’s call out to be touched and throughout his body of work we find images in which the face is not simply an object of contemplation for the camera but also one in which the face is literally being touched by others. In Little Man, What Now?, for example, Douglass Montgomery repeatedly touches Margaret Sullavan’s face with his handkerchief, a gesture paralleled and somewhat parodied in the same film by DeWitt C. Jennings performing the same actions to Montgomery’s face. While in History Is Made at Night we find a merging of face and hand as first Boyer and then later Arthur draw a face directly onto their own hands which then assumes the role of a character they name Coco. But the hand in Borzage also assumes its own expressive functions through the subtle and expressive use of gesture. In Lucky Star (1929), the act of Charles Farrell washing Janet Gaynor’s hands for their first lunch together becomes a major step in bringing the two together and in Gaynor’s transformation from child into woman. Lazybones is among the most interesting of Borzage’s films in this regard in which gesture not only serves its immediate emotional function within a sequence but acquires structural meaning over the course of the narrative. In particular, the film draws a strong link between Pitts’s repeated gesture of placing her hand to her mouth at moments of emotional crisis and the same gesture being performed by her illegitimate daughter who is otherwise unaware that Pitts is her real mother. (More here)
(image via White City Cinema)
