As usual, the visuals are make-or-break for me, and I was
captivated. Street Angels opens with a
long tracking shot across a huge sound stage brimming with action, a bravura
opening worthy of Spielberg that pulls your attention immediately into the film,
where the story and characters will soon anchor you. And a similar shot later gives visual variety
as the camera follows Gino‘s hunt for the missing Angela. Borzage also uses fog for visual interest –
as when the couple heads to Naples on a boat and later as Gino searches the wharves
for Angela—and he works with depth of field to hold the eye in shots like the
one of the circus on top of a hill overlooking a bay. In that shot, the eye is torn between the
beautiful background and the action in the foreground. The camera also shifts perspective to keep
the eye alert. During Angela’s act on
stilts, we see the bottom of the stilts in the foreground with bowling pins and
the faces of the audience in front of us, as though we’re looking directly at
them from backstage; similarly, we peer around a bottle on a table when Angela
is trying to negotiate her departure from Gino in order to head to jail. And at the end of the film, the camera is
suddenly elevated with the characters looking up. This restless energy, with occasional
off-center, dynamic composition, Street Angel has a visual energy that makes
it hard to turn away from.
Into this, Borzage throws a little German Expressionism for
added engagement. Shadows are fraught
with significance as they arch and loom behind characters. In early scenes of Angela’s narrow escape
from the police and her climbing down a gutter, exaggerated shadow heightens
the menace. Later, Angela’s induction
into jail is an abstract play of light, shadow and shapes which become jail
bars, stairs and spears. And the jail
scenes themselves are very Expressionistic since we see the female prisoners as
large shadows before we see them as people; the prison work stations are as
elevated and exaggerated as any scene in Metropolis.
The teacher in the MOOC holds that silents use melodrama
(and, I suspect, humor) to engage an audience, and the melodrama is on full
show in Street Angel. Financial
desperation figures in some of the melodrama as we’re moved that Angela is
forced into prostitution because she can’t afford medicine for her sick mother,
and we’re touched that the sweet Gino takes some of his little money to buy Angela
a flower. There’s also the gratuitous
melodrama of Massetto’s goodbye and the sacred and profane love contrast as the
prostitute and her john pass the happy couple of Angela and Gino exiting their
apartment. There’s also ironic melodrama
as the couple toast their future although there’s a policeman just outside
waiting to incarcerate Angela, and even 21st century me was moved as Angela
sends the drunk but happy Gino to bed but turns back and grab at his feet one
last time before she’s taken off. And
the ending of the film is high melodrama as Gino is about to kill her in a church
but sees the portrait of her he has previously done showing her angelic
side; he looks from the painting into her eyes and forgives her because he recognizes her goodness. This melodrama is certainly outdated, but
there’s no denying the power it certainly once wielded and, to a much lesser extent,
still has.
There’s also a cuteness in this silent film that involves us
in the story and characters. The casting
here certainly engages as the archetypal innocent waif of Janet Gaynor is teamed
with the heartbreakingly cute Charles Farrell.
While the waifishness of Gaynor may not play as well today as it did
then, the innocent hunkiness of Farrell is still fresh. And the two actors play on these
characteristics. Too cute and
inexperienced to sell herself, Angela comically fails as a prostitute, and the
goofy hunk Gino gets chewed on by a bear as he gazes longingly at Angela. In fact, animals contribute no small amount
of humor here as a monkey salutes the policeman and a goat gives Angela a
particularly hard—and funny—butt. One
sweet, humorous moment has Angela wrapping herself in Gino’s coat pretending he’s
holding her, a scene that Michel Hazanavicius elaborated in last year’s silent
film salute, The Artist. The humor certainly engages in this film.
Coming at the end of the silent era, Street Angel is an
affective high point in that art. The
film already forecasts some of innovation that sound will bring as it gives us
some music with an identifiable source in the whistling (while Gino is painting
and when Angela is on stilts), in the rower singing, and in the band performing on the bridge. But Street Angel doesn’t
need sound to engage us. Borzage is a
master of the language of silent film, and he takes us along on this ride just
fine without it.
