Twentieth Century Fox has stolen a march on the other major film companies when it comes to rediscovering and showcasing its heritage. At the end of 2007, Fox released an expansive DVD set called “Ford on Film,” consisting of two dozen movies that John Ford directed for the company from 1920 to 1952.
A deluxe follow-up appeared during the recent holiday season: “Murnau, Borzage and Fox,” a retrospective that collects a dozen vintage titles directed by two men, the German F.W. Murnau and American Frank Borzage, for company founder William Fox between 1925 and 1932.
Silent movies were ripening toward an unwelcome demise during those years. A richly expressive golden age in the aftermath of World War I was destined to be eclipsed by an irresistible innovation, recorded sound.
Three of the silent pictures preserved in Fox’s impressive new set — Mr. Murnau’s “Sunrise” and Mr. Borzage’s “Seventh Heaven” and “Street Angel” — loomed large in the first Academy Awards ceremony. Janet Gaynor won the best actress prize for her performances in all three films. They were shot consecutively, and Miss Gaynor reached her 20th birthday during this enchanted professional interlude. In addition, “Seventh Heaven” won the first awards for direction and screenwriting. “Sunrise” also took the cinematography award and a short-lived prestige category that singled out “artistic quality of production.”
There’s a lot to be said for revisiting these Fox classics during every Oscar season, and now they’re available in a single attractive package, although it’s a pricey one, about $180 through Amazon.com. Despite the hard-boiled and mocking outlook that modern filmmakers consider flattering, tear-jerkers remain an indispensable cinematic genre. Consider three of the current best picture nominees: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Milk” and “Slumdog Millionaire.” Consider the best of the animated films, “Wall•E,” a splendid argument for comedic tear-jerkers. Eighty years later, Miss Gaynor’s legendary trio remains exceptionally stirring.
The most ambitious (and overextended) Hollywood mogul of the late 1920s, William Fox was so impressed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s inventive 1925 picture “Der Letzte Mann,” retitled “The Last Laugh” in the United States, that he was determined to recruit its director for his own company. A receptive party, Mr. Murnau became a celebrated transplant in 1926. He enjoyed carte blanche during the production of “Sunrise,” an alternately ominous and joyous fable about a farm couple, Miss Gaynor and George O’Brien, who survive estrangement and a storm at sea in the course of a perilous day.
Envisioned as a stylistic pacesetter, the movie was also meant to elevate the aspirations of other key directors at Fox, notably John Ford, Mr. Borzage, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks. “Sunrise” did make an immediate impact and exert a lasting influence. During Mr. Murnau’s stay his activities were interwoven most closely with those of Mr. Borzage, who came to the studio in 1925 but had been directing since 1916.
The DVD set includes the cycle of three Murnau pictures and four Borzage pictures that were shot from 1926 to 1928. However, Mr. Murnau’s second, “4 Devils,” a melodrama about trapeze performers, remains a lost film, evoked in a generously illustrated book and a documentary tribute that rely on production stills, sketches and scenario extracts.
Acquiring an ingenuous leading lady straight from “Sunrise,” Mr. Borzage showcased Miss Gaynor exquisitely in both “Seventh Heaven” and “Street Angel.” Then he loaned her compatibly adorable leading man, Charles Farrell, to the Murnau team for “City Girl,” the third and last of the great director’s Fox movies. This was a regrettable, premature parting of the ways between patron and artist to judge from the silent version, which has happily survived an ill-advised semi-talkie edition released in 1930.
The copy of “City Girl” in the Murnau-Borzage set looks wonderful; the content, which contrasts urban and rural locales in a manner that reverses the methodology of “Sunrise,” retains considerable romantic charm and intensity while protecting a love match between Mr. Farrell as a naive farmer and Mary Duncan as a waitress.
A curious sidelight of that first Academy Awards ceremony is that it was so belated that the Fox-Murnau partnership had soured by the time “Sunrise,” the most acclaimed movie of 1927, became a major prize winner. The eligibility period ran from August 1, 1927, to July 31, 1928. This was interpreted so loosely by so many people that the awards weren’t announced until February 1929.
Awards night itself was even later, May 16. By then, the second and third Murnau films had proved disappointments. His Fox contract was terminated well short of the original agreement, which envisioned five movies. By spring 1929, the director himself had sailed to Tahiti to make “Tabu,” which became his last movie. Mr. Murnau died in a car crash near Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1931, at age 42.
The mood-shifting and pictorial virtuosity of “Sunrise” appears to hurl open all kinds of imaginative portals for filmmakers, from the most fantastic and abstract kinds of depiction to the most banal and heartfelt. Mr. Borzage evidently derived both picturesque and emotional inspiration from the Murnau example, but it was the tender, heartfelt aspects that became his abiding specialty and strength during a career that extended to the end of the 1950s and reached almost 100 titles.
Mr. Fox once told Miss Gaynor that the perfect movie director would be a blend of Mr. Murnau’s intellect and Mr. Borzage’s heart. Not that one was a total stranger to sentiment and the other to thought, but their mutual boss had a point.
Mr. Borzage (1893-1962) remains the only famous director to hail from Salt Lake City. Also the most exotic, because he was one of 14 children born to immigrant parents, an Italian-Austrian father and Swiss-German mother. Eight siblings survived, and several worked in the film industry after their brother blazed a professional trail in the years 1912-16.
Mr. Borzage came to Fox with a world of experience and a bent for mysticism that may have been refined in crucial ways by professional contact with Mr. Murnau.
An admirer has observed that Mr. Borzage’s reputation has repeatedly lapsed into unfashionability, typically on grounds of “rank sentimentality.”
It’s an abiding truth that resistance to his best movies is nearly impossible — and arguably inhuman. For example, in “Seventh Heaven” and “Street Angel,” the young lovers played by Miss Gaynor and Mr. Farrell, ostensibly Parisians in the former and Neapolitans in the latter, share memorably endearing courtships and surmount obstacles that require acts of faith, blind longing or divine intervention that seem to merit emotional exaltation, especially during their astonishing finales.
I’m not sure I’d want to have much to do with anyone who professed to be immune to or contemptuous of Mr. Borzage’s romantic-sentimental classics. More about him next week, when the subject shifts to the early Borzage talkies included in “Murnau, Borzage and Fox.”
TITLE: “Murnau, Borzage and Fox”
CONTENTS: 12-disc set with 10 complete movies and two fragmentary titles directed by F.W. Murnau or Frank Borzage from 1925 to 1932 at the Fox Film Corp., augmented by a documentary feature and two illustrated books
RUNNING TIME: About 20 hours, plus supplementary material
DVD EDITION: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
WEB SITE: www.foxhome.com
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