Frank Borzage

Of all the major Hollywood directors whose careers straddled the silent and sound eras -- including John Ford, Howard Hawks, and King Vidor -- none is more problematic than Frank Borzage. He won Academy Awards as Best Director in both the silent and sound periods, and his career encompassed immensely popular movies of the 1930s and fascinating, if not financially successful or critically accepted, movies well into the 1940s and the end of the 1950s. Yet, by the end of his career, Borzage's work was relegated to historical status, and is today widely regarded as hopelessly dated and sentimental. Frank Borzage (pronounced "Bor-ZAY-gee") was of Swiss, Italian, and Austrian ancestry, born in Salt Lake City, UT, the fourth of eight children of an Italian-speaking stonemason father and a German-speaking mother. He was a true child of the West, even working in a gold mine at the age of 13, in addition to working in construction with his father. As a boy, however, he was drawn to acting and joined a traveling theatrical company in his teens. His entry into the movie business came during the early years of the 1910s, as an extra in Allan Dwan Western films starring Wallace Reid, but by 1913, at age 20, he'd gone to work for producer/director Thomas Ince. He was supposed to be a general-purpose actor, moving between light leading roles and supporting parts as villains, but in 1914, he achieved stardom in The Wrath of the Gods, a melodrama about an interracial romance between Borzage's character and a woman portrayed by Tsuru Aoki. He starred in several more notable films for Ince, and by 1916, had become an actor/director, beginning with The Pitch O' Chance. Those were heady days for several key filmmakers who would dominate American cinema in the decades to comei -- John Ford was just starting to direct, though his brother Francis Ford (later an actor) was much better known in that capacity, and Henry King had moved into the director's chair, while King Vidor had yet to establish himself as a filmmaker. In 1920, Borzage released Humoresque (which was remade in 1946), his first major film as a director, based on a novel by Fannie Hurst. Notable as an extraordinarily vivid drama about Jewish life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (which made extensive use of actual location shots), the film moved Borzage to the front ranks of Hollywood's newest generation of directors. His other important silent titles included the 1923 drama The 'Nth Commandment (which was also the first of more than a dozen movies that he produced as well as directed) and, after moving to Fox Picture Corp., Seventh Heaven (1927), for which he earned the very first Academy Award ever given for Best Director. In the bargain, he helped turn Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell into stars of the first magnitude -- he followed it up a year later with the even better Street Angel, re-teaming Gaynor and Farrell in one of the finest films of the 1920s. Borzage's silent-era films stood head-and-shoulders above other Hollywood dramas of the period, in that he drew a rare naturalism from his actors that eluded most of his rivals and contemporaries in the director's chair -- they avoided almost all of the excessive nuances and emoting that today make most silents difficult to take seriously, if not to watch. Borzage barely skipped a beat with the coming of sound, doing a 1930 adaptation, Liliom (which had been previously shot in Germany by Fritz Lang), and Bad Girl (1931), for which Borzage earned his second Best Director Oscar and which gave both Sally Eilers and James Dunn two of the best roles of their respective careers. The following year, he directed A Farewell to Arms, one of the most acclaimed and successful screen adaptations of a contemporary novel of the period, starring Helen Hayes (who got a Best Actress nomination) and Gary Cooper, which is also notable from a directorial point of view for the dark, expressionist approach that Borzage took to the segments involving the action of the First World War. Filmmaking actually became something of a family activity for the entire Borzage clan during these years, the director using members of his family in small roles -- his younger brother Danny Borzage actually had a separate, successful screen career beginning in the late '30s, closely associated with John Ford, starting in The Grapes of Wrath and Stagecoach, in both of which he played an accordionist; another brother, Lew Borzage, worked for many years as an assistant director, both on Frank's films and on those of other directors. By the mid-'30s, Frank Borzage was regarded as one of Hollywood's finest screen craftsmen, looked to for his sensitive, delicate touch in handling difficult stories -- perhaps the most representative of his films was Three Comrades, made for MGM and producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz, about the friendship between three childhood friends and a girl (Margaret Sullavan) who dies young. He made important movies for several studios during the early to middle part of the decade, doing A Farewell to Arms at Paramount, Secrets (a remake of his own 1924 film) at United Artists (which marked Mary Pickford's screen farewell), and Living on Velvet at Warner Bros., but by the second half of the '30s Borzage had settled at MGM, then the most prestigious studio in Hollywood. Although his work was best known for its sentimentality and emotional nature, Borzage could and did make movies on serious topical subjects of social significance, most notably Little Man, What Now? (1934), starring Margaret Sullavan and Douglass Montgomery, which told of the plight of the ordinary man in post-World War I Germany. Even this film, as with Borzage's most well-known dramas, had a strong tearjerker component that was accepted by filmgoers at the time but, in later years, made them seem (inaccurately) like "women's pictures." He also directed Joan Crawford in three of her most intriguing movies of the period, Mannequin, The Shining Hour (both 1938), and Strange Cargo (1940), the latter an odd symbolic adventure-drama that is one of the strangest and most fascinating films to come out of MGM during this period. In 1940, Borzage also directed The Mortal Storm, an unusual pre-World War II Hollywood attack on the social order of Nazi Germany, depicting the destruction of an innocent family; it is probably the Borzage movie that plays best to modern audiences. During the first half of the 1940s, Borzage's output became decidedly less interesting. Flight Command (1941) was a routine, albeit very well-cast story of military pilots and their private lives, while The Vanishing Virginian was a gentle, sentimental story of life in a rural, early 20th-century white southern household, and Smilin' Through was a handsome but empty remake of a romantic ghost story that had been filmed twice before, in the 1920s and the 1930s. Stage Door Canteen (1943) was his major contribution to the war effort, and in addition to its careful balance of patriotism and sentimentality -- a feat that only Borzage could have pulled off this nimbly, especially in the full-length version -- it is essential viewing for 1940s popular culture fanatics, with its enviable mix of entertainment talent. In 1945, Borzage moved to RKO where he showed himself an able satirist with The Spanish Main, a gentle jape at the conventions of the pirate movie. He moved to Republic Pictures in 1946, where studio chief Herbert J. Yates was trying to make a small body of "art"-oriented movies and higher-quality films than his usual outputs of Westerns, serials, B-comedies, and musicals -- the result was I've Always Loved You (1946), a sweet and sentimental melodrama about a pair of musicians (Catherine McLeod, Philip Dorn) torn apart by professional rivalry, and the man's stubbornness; shot in color and featuring pianist Arthur Rubinstein on the soundtrack, it was the single most expensive movie ever released by Republic up to that time. Moonrise (1949) was Borzage's venture into the dark psychological eddies of film noir, and was one of his finest efforts, beautifully directed and filled with visually stunning scenes, though the script's weaknesses kept it from being regarded as a classic. This was to be his final film for a decade -- his lack of theatrical film work during this period has led some critics and scholars to suggest that Borzage was blacklisted, but this is patently untrue. The kind of movies in which he specialized were simply no longer being made -- even the output of his contemporaries King Vidor and John Ford slackened during this period (though Ford always had John Wayne, with his immense box office appeal, available to help get a film up and running). Borzage did direct three installments of the anthology series Screen Director's Playhouse, but was otherwise unseen again until 1958 when he made China Doll. A World War II drama starring Victor Mature, Li Li Hua, and Ward Bond, it told the tale of a hard-drinking, disillusioned Army Air Force pilot who accidentally buys a wife and gradually falls in love with her; he finds himself with a new reason to enjoy and savor life, and they marry and have a child; both of them are killed by the Japanese, but their daughter survives, the living embodiment of the two of them and the love they shared. China Doll was greeted indifferently by the critics and was on television as early as 1965, but it has since come to be regarded as a superb coda to the main body of Borzage's work. He closed out his career the following year with one of his few misfires, a sincere but leaden attempt at making a religious epic. Adapted from Lloyd C. Douglas' bestseller, The Big Fisherman was shot in Super Panavision and ran more than three hours before being edited down to 164 minutes and then to 149 minutes; it was a financial disaster, though its religious subject matter and availability gave it a second lease on life on television during the late '70s, when it was syndicated nationally (in a heavily cropped and edited form). In 1961, he also participated in an uncredited capacity as one of three directors (one of the others was Edgar G. Ulmer) on L'Atlantide, a science fiction-adventure film produced in Europe that wasn't widely seen in America. The following year, Borzage died of cancer -- by that time, he was considered by many critics to have long outlived his best work, most of which was thought of as celebrated but dated relics of a bygone era. In the decades since, Borzage's reputation has slowly been revived as younger viewers have discovered his best work and accepted it on its own merits. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide