Key
Collaborators: Cedric Gibbons (Production
Designer), Margaret Sullavan (Leading Player), Joseph
L. Mankiewicz (Producer), Franz Waxman (Composer), Joan
Crawford (Leading Player), Robert Young
(Leading Player), William Fox (Producer), George Folsey
(Cinematographer), Janet Gaynor (Leading Player),
Lawrence Hazard
(Screenwriter)
Highly
Recommended: A
Farewell to Arms (1932), Man's Castle (1933), Three
Comrades (1938), Moonrise (1948)
Recommended: Seventh
Heaven (1927), Lucky Star (1929), Little
Man, What Now (1934), Mannequin
(1937), History is Made at Night (1937), The Shining Hour (1938),
Strange Cargo (1940)
"By the
mid-1920s, Borzage was one of the most successful Hollywood
directors - as witness the fact that he won the newly created
Oscar for direction twice in its first five years - for Seventh
Heaven and Bad Girl. War, and the consequent taste
for realism, destroyed the world he had created and after The
Mortal Storm, only one other film - Moonrise -
properly revealed his talent. As a result, he is now badly
neglected." - David
Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002)
"Frank
Borzage was that rarity of rarities, an uncompromising
romanticist...Borzage never needed dream worlds for his
suspension of disbelief. He plunged into the real worlds of
poverty and oppression, the world of Roosevelt and Hitler, the
New Deal and the New Order, to impart an aura to his characters,
not merely through soft focus and a fluid camera, but through a
genuine concern with the wondrous inner life of lovers in the
midst of adversity." - Andrew
Sarris (The American Cinema, 1968)
"Crucial
to his films' incandescent romanticism were his fluid use of the
camera, floating through unoccupied spaces to suggest mysterious
invisible forces existing beyond the material realm, and a focus
on luminous faces; his attention to actresses, especially Janet
Gaynor and Margaret Sullavan, made unusually palpable the
strength of their undying love." - Geoff
Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)
