Pretty Good

One of my all time favorites.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Lucky Star (1929)*** (out of 4)Entertaining silent drama has Timothy (Charles Farrell) and poor farm girl Mary (Janet Gaynor) meeting under bad circumstances before the start of WWI. After the war Timothy returns home as a cripple and soon he and Mary strike up a strong friendship, which doesn't sit too well with people in town or Mary's mother due to their prejudice against him being cripple. LUCKY STAR should have been a complete disaster but director Frank Borzage and the two stars do a remarkable job at building up the drama and there's no question that the message really packs a punch. The film is incredibly dark and this is especially true when it comes to the message of how people were pretty much throwing cripples into a lonely shack and forgetting about them. The message of this not being right is certainly well told here and especially because there's no melodrama preaching but instead it's perfectly built into the story. I was really surprised to see how dark this part of the story was told and it's pretty darn grim. Some of the best moments in the film deal with the blossoming relationship between the two stars. They made several films together and it's easy to see why because their chemistry just jumps right off the screen. The romance here is quite good and manages to keep a smile on your face throughout. Gaynor, as you'd expect, has no trouble playing the charming farm girl and Farrell is just as great and especially during his more dramatic scenes dealing with not being able to walk. Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams is excellent as the rival for Gaynor's attention and Hedwiga Reicher makes for a great villain as her mother. The ending is incredibly far-fetched but it's so perfectly executed that you can't help but get caught up in the drama.

*SPOILERS FOR VARIOUS BORZAGE FILMS, INCLUDING THIS ONE*"Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me," Morrissey once moaned. "No hope, no harm, just another false alarm." There's surely no-one living who hasn't, before ultimately finding some excellent brunette who also likes Melvyn Douglas, woken up with a hollowness in their middle, wishing those heady, involuntary ramblings of the previous hours were real. It's only Frank Borzage, though, who ever came close to capturing the gentle, lazy, in-sync rhythms of a romantic dream*. Yes, his silent dramas feature mad dashes to the finish, with near-biblical love-fuelled miracles that restore mobility, faith and even life itself, but it's the tender mid-sections that are often the most remarkable (Street Angel is the glorious exception), rich in exploration and that most underrated of emotions - fondness - as the characters quietly circle one another in a dance of romance. Love stories in Borzage films honour honesty, patience and selflessness, while celebrating quirks of human behaviour rarely lauded on screen: naivety, innocence and loyalty beyond measure. While the forces manipulating his characters can seem clunky or excessively melodramatic - if in doubt, he tends to just send Charlie Farrell to war in France - the central duo, and the love between them, always ring utterly true. In their purest, sweetest incarnations these characters are played by Janet Gaynor and Farrell. While he was more of a star than an actor, she was unquestionably and invigoratingly both. I'm not sure I've ever seen an actress with such a startling, natural precision of emotion.The pair's warm, wonderful chemistry dominates Lucky Star, a pastoral film that sees his straightforward wire-fixer and her amoral farm girl initially at loggerheads, only for the war to intervene (quelle surprise). Brilliantly, they truly connect after she takes some belated revenge on him for a spanking by chucking a brick through his window. Two years later. The film's set-up is amusing and the economical war scenes are nicely done (though the trick of intercutting between villain Guinn Williams grinning his head off and Farrell getting blown up is a little heavyhanded), but it's with the budding of romance that the film truly blossoms. The scenes in which Farrell "makes over" Gaynor - both inside and out, washing her hair and admonishing her for telling whoppers - are subtle, beautifully-conceived and wonderfully played. My favourite moment is when Gaynor drops the needle on her new music player, turning with a blissful expression to Farrell's lonely paraplegic, who's cooped up in his house and watching through that broken window. If Liliom (see below) seems to prove right every misconception about talkies (the utter nonsense you hear about stilted dialogue and bad acting does apply to a lot of sound films made before 1931), then the curiously-titled Lucky Star makes those who ignorantly seek to lampoon silent film look utterly ridiculous. The acting is naturalistic, the pace perfect and the baddie just a big guy trying to get his end away. He may be horrible, but he's no moustache-twiddling caricature.In 7th Heaven, Borzage contrasted the dankness of an inner-city squat with the transcendence of the action within. Here, he makes the countryside a character: the pain of rural poverty drives the latter stages of the story, just as the airy idyll of the house and the trickling stream beyond piles atmosphere upon atmosphere in the film's immersive second act. Always one to place climactic obstacles in the way of his characters (an endless stream of people going in the opposite direction, redundancy, an iceberg), his final trick is to lob a snow blizzard at them; even the weather conspiring against these true lovers. But through it all their affecting romance never falters in tone or integrity. This, Gaynor and Farrell's last silent film together (they'd go on to make nine talkies, mostly musical-comedies), is one of the sweetest and most touching films I've seen. He equips himself notably well in a tough part - the scenes of his stricken soldier fighting to walk seem unusually realistic; well, apart from at the end - she's simply mesmerising, and together they're just a dream. Someone should tell Morrissey.PS: "I thought I was making you over and... you've made me over. Good as new." Sob.

Lucky Star begins in a small town and focuses on a small tomboy (Janet Gaynor). She spends her time carting various goods around town to make money for her family and brings some milk to a work site for sale. There she causes trouble between two of the men, one named Martin who believes she tried to cheat him out of his money (Guinn Williams) and the other, Tim, who defends her innocence (Charles Farrell). Suddenly, the quaint sentiment is broken by the announcement of WWI and then scatter off to enlist. A few years later, we see the town after the war. Tim has lost the ability to use his legs and is confined to a wheelchair. Martin is a man about town who uses his stint in the war for his own personal gain. The tomboy is a bit older now, but still as mischievous as before. She befriends Tim, who by this time is very lonely, and the two form a strong bond. However, Martin sees how beautiful the girl has become and goes about wooing her mother for her hand in marriage.A heartfelt movie with a great cast, Lucky Star is one of those movies that should be released on DVD. It is talked about often among cinephiles but is rarely seen. The copy I saw was a terrible print with an ill-fitting soundtrack; if it was good in spite of those things, just think of how wonderful it could be with a clear print and a great soundtrack! Unfortunately, most of Frank Borzage's beautiful cinematography was lost in the haze of the damaged print, but it was no doubt an asset to the film. The outdoor scenes show a picturesque town with almost fantastical homes. It adds to the charm of the love story.

SPOILER NOTE: contains spoilers about Lucky Star and its predecessors Seventh Heaven and Street Angel.As the followup to the hugely successful sentimental hit Seventh Heaven and its successful, but far less appealing followup, Street Angel (see review of that film for more details), Lucky Star, which was lost until c. 1990 and then rediscovered fairly rapturously, has the feel of a chastened attempt to return to a more faithful rendition of a popular formula (or two). Again, it's a tale of young lovers separated by circumstances they must overcome, but like Seventh Heaven rather than Street Angel, what will come between a young couple is not merely their own moralistic attitudes, but World War I. This time the setting, however, is not the proles' Paris or Naples, but a rural hamlet out of a Griffith film or Tol'able David, thus bringing the stars back home for American audiences after becoming too European in both setting and tone. Where Farrell was a layabout artiste in Street Angel, here he's not only a ruggedly American pole-climber for the electric company, but in the opening scene winds up trading punches with his boss at the top of the pole! In the war he loses the ability to walk, and back home in a wheelchair he forms a friendship with young Gaynor, who's good-hearted white trash. But her harridan mom has eyes set on Farrell's old boss, a scoundrel and a rake in his Army uniform who, however, looks to be prosperous and, most importantly, has two working legs. Again, as in Street Angel, the movie does Farrell few favors by reducing him to an emasculated role-- rather too much of the middle section has him offering Gaynor grooming tips and shampooing her hair, which ain't exactly how Clark Gable made it big. But it works at least as the low point from which Farrell's character will rebound when, like the shill for a faith healer, he rises from that wheelchair and heroically makes his way on two legs and crutches to save her from the scoundrel and, as in Seventh Heaven, fulfill the deepest fantasy of everyone in the audience who had a family member return damaged by the war. The old Seventh Heaven formula works one last time in a rousing conclusion to the silent era for the stars and the director who made them indelible. (Gaynor had one more silent to go, but we'll let that pass.) Visually, Lucky Star survives in a much better copy than Street Angel, the UCLA restoration of which was extremely grainy (16mm blowup?), and so the real pleasure of the film is less the story, though its emotional impact is real, than Borzage's presentation of it in gauzy, shimmery late silent Poetic-o-Vision. The sets-- which may have recycled some of Sunrise's, though they're shot quite differently-- have a kind of heightened reality, presenting multiple planes on which action may take place (a house might be in the middle, for instance, but a road will wrap around front and back so that we might see action taking place either right in front of us, or up on the road behind the house). It's not exactly stage-like, but certainly not realistic either; maybe the best analogy is to something like the entire fantasy town constructed for Robert Altman's Popeye, which allowed his improvisational camera to poke around at will (unlike the sets in so many fantasy films, e.g. a Batman movie, which are clearly just what the storyboard shows for that shot and no more). Borzage's camera-work is not improvisational, it's clearly planned, but it's also just as clear that the whole environment is quite solid and detailed, and this sort of dreamlike vividness makes Lucky Star one of that group of utterly accomplished and visually masterful late silents that show us everything that was about to be lost forever with the transition to sound. Indeed, in Lucky Star's case even that final testament to silence was lost for 60 years-- until, like Chico in Seventh Heaven, against all odds it made its way back from the land of the dead.