Janet Gaynor at the Harvard Film Archive
By STEVE VINEBERG | September 27, 2006
THE SHAMROCK HANDICAP: Gaynor is very photogenic but doesn’t get much to do here. |
Janet Gaynor was the first actress to win the Academy Award, and in her day — the late-silent and early-talkie eras — she was fantastically popular, especially in the 11 movies she made with the likable, curly-haired Charles Farrell. But she bowed out of movies in the late ’30s, nearly half a century before she died, and she’s long been forgotten. In its series “Centennial Starlets: Anna May Wong and Janet Gaynor,” the Harvard Film Archive is providing a rare opportunity to see some of Gaynor’s work — 16 features and the 1926 short, “Pep of the Lazy ‘J,’ ” that prompted Fox to sign her for her first full-length picture. She leaped to stardom: by 1928 she had already won her Oscar, for a trio of films: Seventh Heaven and Street Angel, both directed by Frank Borzage and co-starring Farrell, and Sunrise, directed by F.W. Murnau. This weekend you can see all three, as well as her first two silents, The Johnstown Flood and The Shamrock Handicap, and her last one, Lucky Star, another collaboration with Borzage and Farrell. Movie buffs may want to arrange their Saturday and Sunday schedules accordingly.Neither The Johnstown Flood, a melodrama so clunky it almost descends into farce, nor The Shamrock Handicap, a slice of horse-race blarney from John Ford, gives much of an indication of what Borzage and Murnau might have seen in Gaynor. Diminutive, with a sweet, compact face, she’s very photogenic but she hasn’t much to do in either picture. Fortunately, Borzage, a Salt Lake native who found in the elaborate, stylized Hollywood of the late ’20s the ideal resources for a distinctively 19th-century vision, and Murnau, a German Expressionist who, emigrating to Hollywood at the peak of his career, decided on American actors for his adaptation of his countryman Hermann Sudermann’s novel A Trip to Tilsit, both fastened on Gaynor as the embodiment of their separate versions of romanticism. They located her poignant, waif-like quality, her depth of feeling (at her best, she can stand proudly alongside Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford), and a quite startling expressive range. In Sunrise, she’s the heartbroken country wife whose husband (George O’Brien, who’d played scenes with her in The Johnstown Flood) is in thrall to a vamp from the city (Margaret Livingston); he plots to drown his wife but comes to his senses and then has to win back her trust. As Angela in Street Angel, she’s a desperately poor Neapolitan girl who descends to thievery and solicitation to cadge money for her dying mother’s medicine; caught and sent to prison, she escapes with a traveling circus, becoming independent and free-spirited. Farrell is Gino, the carefree painter who falls in love with her face and joins the circus so he can paint her. In Lucky Star he’s a soldier crippled in the First World War and she’s a farm girl, brought up by a strict, unhappy mother (Hedwiga Reicher) to be neither honest nor clean, whom he mentors and transforms. (I wasn’t able to see Seventh Heaven.)
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