7th Heaven (1927)

Over the next while, I plan to go through all of the movies that have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture on this blog. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I know there are a lot of people who think very little of the Academy’s award practices and others who think far too much. In my experience, the movies that have been honored by these awards are not necessarily the best of their respective years or even the winners of a mere popularity contest, as some claim. I see them as the representation of what was considered great film-making through the years. Naturally, this view has changed with time, but all of these movies are still important in understanding and appreciating the history of film as seen through the eyes of each year’s immediate popularity.

In the past 85 years of the awards, there have been 500 nominees for the top honor, beginning with 1927’s 7^th Heaven and currently ending with 2012’s Les Miserables. I have already seen more than 300 of these, but have written about only a handful. So, I will be re-watching each title with fresh eyes for this series. I did briefly consider the idea of going through all the movies in chronological order, discarding it when I realized how many of the early movies were going to be a little harder to come by. I will instead cover the movies in whatever random order suits me, though I am still beginning with the oldest nominee, because I happened to have just acquired a copy and it seems like a good place to start.

7^th Heaven began as a play by Austin Strong, which was one of the most popular of the 20s. It ran for three years and had over 700 performances on Broadway. William Fox acquired the rights to make the film version, which was to be made out of a screenplay written by Frances Marion. However, when Frank Borzage signed on as director, Flesh and the Devil author Benjamin Glazer was brought in to alter Marion’s version of the story to a more appropriate length. As the production continued, more and more of the original play was discarded for the sake of the picture’s artistic integrity.

Frank Borzage was considered the greatest Hollywood director of his time. He had originally been a trained actor, working on the stage and in occasional film roles, getting his first director’s job in 1915. By 1925, he was already a well-respected cinematic figure, with actors appreciating his professional experience and technicians discovering that he had a great understanding of visual composition. When he signed a contract with Fox in 1925, he was to be paid $35,000 per film, an extravagant sum. He made a total of 18 movies for Fox between 1925 and 1932, including 7^th Heaven, which was the 13^th highest grossing silent film of all time and won Borzage the first Academy Award for directing.

The story of the play was simple. A sewage worker named Chico dreams of being a street-washer. He is given the job by a priest who witnesses him save a prostitute named Diane from the cruelty of her sister. Through circumstances befitting slapstick comedy, but played with all seriousness, Chico offers to let Diane stay in his home and pretend to be his wife. As probably expected, the two wind up falling in love, a romance that it tested and strengthened by the onset of the first World War. The role of Diane was much sought after, with big names such as Mary Pickford and Joan Crawford among those considered for the part. The role was given to little-known actress Janet Gaynor without a screen test when Borzage watched her working on a different film. Unknown Irish actor Charles Farrell was cast as Chico, making the risky choice of having no recognizable stars in the film, a decision that paid off. After the popularity of this film, Gaynor and Farrell made 10 more together, including two with Borzage.

The performances by the young stars-in-the-making are startlingly natural. Farrell had virtually no experience as an actor, yet he provides his character with great energy, which is best utilized in scenes of light comedy, like when he and a co-worker can’t stop bowing to each other. With an enormous build, he towers over his co-stars, making the petite Janet Gaynor look like a midget in comparison. Remarkably, Farrell plays Chico with a kind gruffness, making the character perpetually likable. We are always aware that the character’s attempts at a rough and nasty disposition are in vain. Notice how believable the actor’s expressions are during the scene in which Diane cuts Chico’s hair slightly too short; few actors could display such frustration without betraying the character’s true spirit.

Janet Gaynor would prove to be the real star of the picture. We must be grateful that Borzage resisted the attempts made by production chief Winfield Sheehan to cast his mistress Madge Bellamy as the lead. Gaynor was destined to play this part. She would achieve equal fame for her role in F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, which was shot at Fox at the same time as 7^th Heaven, but she is such a perfect Diane the part could have been written for her. Slender and meek, with a child-like face, she was pretty, but not beautiful, the perfect image of the downtrodden soul. Miraculously, Gaynor’s performance avoids all the acting conventions of the era. Her Diane is never pitiful, played with such sincerity that even when she is required to lash out, we believe every action. Perhaps the only fault with her performance is that she is so convincingly timid that we could never imagine her as anything so dirty as a prostitute. She would go on to win the first Academy Award for Best Actress.

The overall greatness of 7^th Heaven is a testament to the greatness of Frank Borzage. Josef von Sternberg, Sergei Eisenstein and Samuel Fuller have all cited him as an influence on their work, yet his name has been largely forgotten. He had a style of storytelling in which he would ignore telling the story as much as possible in favor of zeroing in on the minutest details. In this film, over half an hour passes before the first real plot point is introduced and the entirety of World War I is covered in the same amount of time. What he has done without our even realizing it is forced a closeness to the characters that couldn’t be accomplished with a more rushed pace. This closeness is essential in making the movie more like a natural progression of daily life events and less like a Hollywood story where we are always aware of the movie being a movie. Before the characters even meet, we have come to know them and can better believe everything they will do afterwards.

Borzage’s simplifications extended beyond the story. With a budget of just over $1 million, the movie lacks a tendency towards glamour. The largely barren sets accurately reflect the appearance of Paris slums and even when the war arrives and hundreds of extras are used, the more important romantic narrative is never sacrificed. Janet Gaynor later recalled Borzage’s direction fondly, commenting that he directed with the heart. Instead of giving his actors commands and layouts, he would extensively discuss the scenes until actor and director were like-minded in their ideas for the character and then they would simply be the character. It was said that he instructed his actors not to act the characters, but to feel the characters. It shows.

If the films of Frank Borzage aren’t as greatly remembered as other movies of the age, it can only be because his were so quiet and unassuming. Compared to 7^th Heaven, other 20s films seem loud and gaudy, even in their silence. Although all of Fox’s resources throughout 1927 were going to the production of Sunrise, which is still rightly remembered as an American masterpiece, William Fox was so impressed with Borzage’s completed film that he released it first. A recorded score was added to compete with the growing popularity of other sound pictures that included occasional sound effects and a song called “Diane,” which would become a bestseller.

The film was an enormous success with critics and audiences, earning back twice as much as the film’s cost in a matter of months. At the first Academy Awards ceremony, the film won Best Director-Drama, Best Actress and Best Screenplay-Adapted and was nominated for Outstanding Production and Best Art Direction. In 1995, it was added to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry and in 1937 it was remade with little acclaim in a version starring Simone Simon and James Stewart.