Frank Borzage’s 7th
Heaven is proof once again that not all melodrama is the same. I can’t explain why a movie like Ordinary
People can seem hackneyed, manipulative and derivative, while 7th Heaven keeps us riveted and in tears of
joy and sadness by the end. I do know
that Borzage held me rapt through every minute of this film.
The main characters and the way the actors play them is a
big factor in this film’s success. Chico
is a chiseled, handsome young man who is overconfident, brash and a little
prone to overpresent himself. “I’m a
very remarkable fellow” is his refrain, one reinforced by the upright posture,
broad gestures and open, smiling face Charles Farrell gives Chico. The boy is also shy, sincere and, it turns
out, vulnerable. He puts great effort into telling Diane that he doesn't care about her, but he shares his food with her,
stops her attempted suicide (complaining that she’s using his knife), and
prevents her from being arrested by lying to the police about them being
married. When they go back to his
apartment, he prepares a bed for her, steals a nightgown from a nearby
clothesline, walks seven flights of stairs to get her water, and then he sleeps
on a blanket on the balcony. It’s
apparent that his bluster is a cover for his attraction to her, an attraction
he fears to admit. “You're not going to
take advantage of me?” he asks as they plan for her to move in. In this sweet moment of honesty, we recognize Chico's vulnerability and see his simplicity in Farrell’s open, honest
face. The actor then goes on to take Chico
from distancing bluster to honest expression of feelings. Farrell’s face is knitted in effort when
Chico tries to say “I love you” but can only muster his sweet, indirect
“Chico…Diane…Heaven;” however, when Chico finally declares his love, Farrell
plays the moment as completely natural. We
also appreciate Farrell’s work at the end of the film. As Chico returns from the war, the change in
Farrell’s body language couldn’t be more eloquent as Chico, bent, tentative,
but eager, rushes to Diane. Throughout
the film, Farrell’s facial expressions and body language keep us engaged with Chico and speak as loudly as the
intertitles of the character's development.
Janet Gaynor's Diane runs through an even wider range of emotions
in the film, and the actor’s face takes us along at every change. Early, Gaynor is wide-eyed and fearful as
Diane’s sister, Nana, bullies and beats the girl. Soon afterwards, Diane registers a
conflict between honesty and lying as and Gaynor's eyes dart and body tenses in communicating the
conflict of the two. Gaynor's body
language is consistently as expressive as her face.
As Diane contemplates suicide in her deep despair, Gaynor’s movements
are listless and her face is empty and unfocused. Later in Chico’s apartment, Gaynor’s eyes are
wide and inquisitive and her movements small and tentative as the unsure Diane
reaches out to Chico to help him with clothes.
In repeated scenes, Gaynor takes us through Diane’s mental process and
emotions, from the nuanced progression of Diane’s recognition of the meaning of
the wedding dress to the emotional ending of the film when, in minutes, Diane
veers from happiness to despair and back to a completely unexpected happiness. Gaynor’s performance here is masterful and an
important reason 7th Heaven can convince us and take us with its melodrama.
And this is a highly charged and melodramatic film whose
story pulls at our heartstrings throughout.
It opens with a Grimm fairy tale scene of Nana viciously beating her
sister Diane with a whip, a beating which goes on and on. Soon afterwards, the evil Nana chases Diane
through the street, beating her as they go and then nearly strangling her to
death, another graphic scene that pulls us in. Diane is soon attempting suicide. But in contrast to this extreme darkness, 7th
Heaven also engages us with a powerful romanticism. When Chico leaves the apartment at one point,
the abused Diane, finally feeling safe, sits in a chair with Chico’s jacket
and is soon pulling the jacket’s arms around her, pretending Chico is holding
her. This scene is so touching that Michel
Hazanavicius quoted it in The Artist, the Academy Award’s Best Film of
2011. Minor characters participate in
7th Heaven's warm melodrama, too. Gobin sweetly
blows on his pregnant wife’s soup to cool it while he's feeding her, and tears run down the rough
character’s face as he leaves his wife for the war. The boisterous Boul kindly cranks up his old Eloise
to take the “newlyweds” around Paris, and he later drives her in the taxi
defense of Paris, hauling French troops to the outskirts to fight the Germans. And 7th Heaven also offers many
melodramatic gestures of love between Diane and Chico. Their decision to marry themselves by sharing
the religious medals between them is one such action, as is their agreement to
pause at 11 am every day. Chico promises to
come to her at that time, and both repeat their shared private expression of
love: "Chico…Diane…Heaven." Another of their melodramatic moments occurs when Chico, leaving for war, asks Diane to stand still; "-
Let me fill my eyes with you!"
says the intertitle. With two actors of
less skill, such melodrama would simply fall flat. With their acting skill, Gaynor and Farrell
sell the melodrama to us, and we accept it.
While the acting and melodrama engage us, the complex intensity of the ending takes the film to a peak of emotion, unexpectedly
drawing on much of what we've heard and seen previously in the film and
intensifying the film’s feelings to a wholly unforseen degree. Diane’s transformations in this ending are
quicksilver. From her confident trust in
her husband at the beginning of the scene, she learns of Chico's death and quickly returns to the despair she
knew in the film’s opening scenes, losing her faith and everything she’d gained
through loving him. Her strength implicitly
sapped, she’s soon resignedly in the arms her lascivious factory supervisor. Meanwhile, Gobin arrives with his wife,
handicapped at having lost an arm in the war. Overall, it’s a sad scene. Borzage then cuts
to the blind Chico struggling to make it home through the armistice celebration,
an ironic, bittersweet scene. Farrell is
bent, uncertain, awkward and even desperate and as Chico struggles up the seven
flights of stairs to the apartment, our dread builds. Not only are we unused to seeing Chico so
vulnerable, but we fear how he will respond to finding the supervisor holding Diane there in the apartment. The film stokes our
apprehension as it crosscuts between Chico and the apartment, but when he bursts into the room, Chico can’t see the supervisor holding Diane, and we watch
Gaynor go from despair to disbelief to comprehension to joy in mere seconds. However, Borzage doesn’t stop the melodrama
at this point. Although he can no longer
see, Chico refers to what he said as he departed for the war, and the
intertitle says, "My eyes are still filled with you." And as if this incredibly romantic line isn't
touching enough, Borzage pushes the melodrama even further by referring to yet
something else we've seen in the movie. “But
nothing can keep Chico blind for long!" says the intertitle, "I tell
you, I'm a very remarkable fellow!"
This is a very powerful, bittersweet ending to the film, suggesting
Chico has the same self-confidence we’ve seen though the movie, but that he may
not understand his circumstances. Gobin
now has only one arm to manage and hold his fire hose, and Chico is blind. Although love triumphs here, 7th
Heaven suggests more challenges may lie ahead.
It’s hard to resist complex, emotion-packed ending like this one, where
script, performance and direction all combine to create an emotional blender.
In addition to the performances and script, Borzage’s
cinematic flourishes also keep us involved in this film. From the early part of the movie, shot composition
is striking. When we first meet Chico,
he’s talking with Rat in the sewer in a balanced shot with a white arc of light
on each side of him and light streaming down from an open manhole above. It’s a beautiful shot. Another beautiful, if slightly ironic,
composition is when the taxis are streaming to the front lines, zigzagging
across the landscape. And as the blind Chico
is struggling up the stairs to his home, the background is an dizzying
Expressionist spiral created by the staircase that is as riveting as it is
effective at describing the emotional content of the scene. Borzage keeps the compostions of 7th
Heaven interesting to look at.
And since Borzage was sharing not only the Fox lot with Murnau but
also his lead actress, it’s not surprising to find technical innovation in this
film. The attention to depth of field in
7th Heaven reflects a Murnau interest. For example, after Chico stops Diane’s
attempted suicide, the camera rests on her while, in the background, we see
Chico’s legs walk away, return and walk away several times before he comes back to
her. In this scene, we get not only the
confused resignation on Gaynor’s foreground face but, in the background, we perceive Chico’s
own uncertainty and confusion. Because the information in the background is as important as that in the foreground, we have to read the
screen attentively to follow all that’s happening in this film. In another cinematic flourish, Borzage uses a
tight tracking shot to follow Diane as Nana chases her with a whip. The movement here recalls Murnau’s tracking work
in Sunrise, though with Borzage, the shot has an interesting sense of both
movement and inescapable claustrophobia.
In this section, too, the visuals keep us focused on the screen. And given the cross-shaped window shadow over
Diane’s bed that directly quotes a similar shot in Sunrise, it’s not a big
stretch to suggest that Murnau may have influenced the bravura tilt/cut shot that
Borzage uses to emphasize that Chico’s apartment is indeed on the titular seventh floor of his
building. Like all the visuals in 7th
Heaven, this vertical tracking shot keeps us focused on the screen and involved
in the movie.
Borzage manages a significant feat in 7th
Heaven. He has a tight, touching script
that engages us with its melodramatic elements, and he directs outstanding
actors who can sell this melodrama to the audience. He then adds to this engagement cinematic
elements that keep us paying attention to the screen. All these combine to make this movie one of
the most affective silent films.
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