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The gutter and the garret, the lows and highs of emotion, Frank Borzage's realm. Venice has its garbagemen (Trouble in Paradise), so here with the sewer under Parisian lights: The street-washer (Charles Farrell) is "a very remarkable fellow" in his own mind, down in the sludge he keeps his eyes on the stars. Elsewhere, the wounded naïf (Janet Gaynor) suffers her sister's whip, scrawny yet as luminous as a Fra Angelico maiden. The man is on bad terms with God, he prays for a bride and gets the suicidal orphan instead, their marriage is a sham for the police. En route to the would-be honeymoon abode, the camera tracks past portals and then up seven floors in a single movement, Gaynor shivers in bed while Farrell makes himself comfortable on the rooftop. (Hitchcock in Blackmail has a darkening nod to this sequence, ascending staircase and all.) Faith mended and vertigo conquered, a mutual redemption "for those willing to climb it." The Great War intrudes, the crucial test for transforming a bogus union into a genuine one—impromptu marital vows are exchanged while the big parade marches outside, a dissolve from the heroine's trembling form to a clock on the wall establishes the telepathic bond. "I'm not used to being happy... It's funny, it hurts." A world of hard cobblestones and exploding trenches softened by passion, the screen as an organism shuddering with nervousness and eroticism, such are Borzage's miracles. The sweeping war scenes, marshaling "the whole French army of taxi cabs" into a blazing No Man's Land, are just a set-up for the true spectacle of romantic belief tested and rewarded. Carax is the full-bodied heir with Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. With Albert Gran, David Butler, Gladys Brockwell, Emile Chautard, and George E. Stone. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |