Frank Borzage
- Born:
- April 23, 1894, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.
- Died:
- June 19, 1962, Los Angeles, California
- Awards And Honors:
- Academy Award (1932)
- Academy Award (1928)
Frank Borzage (born April 23, 1894, Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.—died June 19, 1962, Los Angeles, California) was an American motion-picture director and producer noted for his romantic transcendentalism and technically impeccable filmmaking.
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
Early life and career
Borzage was the son of a master stonemason. He began acting in his teens with a theatrical troupe, doubling as a prop boy before entering films as an actor in 1912 for producer and director Thomas Ince. After appearing in a number of westerns and comedies, he began directing films at the American Film Manufacturing Company in 1915. He worked as an actor and director primarily for Triangle Film Corporation from 1917 to 1919, and in 1918 he switched to directing exclusively. In the early 1920s he worked at Paramount Pictures, First National Pictures, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM).
Borzage worked as an actor and director primarily for Triangle Film Corporation from 1917 to 1919, and in 1918 he switched to directing exclusively.
He finally landed at Fox Film Corporation, the scene of his greatest triumphs, in 1925. There he began with Lazybones, a melancholy romance set in a small town in the American West, though he soon moved over to domestic comedies such as Wages for Wives (1925) and Early to Wed (1926).
Breakthrough and success at Fox
In 1927 Borzage made his breakthrough film, 7th Heaven, a sentimental and beautifully photographed tale of a Parisian sewer worker (played by Charles Farrell) who saves a homeless woman (Janet Gaynor) from despair. At the first Academy Awards ceremony, it won for best actress, best screenplay adaptation, and best director of a dramatic picture. It was also nominated for best picture and best art direction.
Gaynor was awarded not only for her work in 7th Heaven but also for her roles in F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and in Street Angel (1928), the latter being Borzage’s equally romantic pairing of her as a runaway hiding from the police in a circus and Farrell as the painter she inspires. Gaynor and Farrell were teamed again in Borzage’s Lucky Star (1929) as a poor young woman from a farm and the paralyzed World War I veteran who loves her.
Borzage’s final silent film, The River (1929), is a romantic idyll between a naive farmer (Farrell) and an experienced woman from the city (Mary Duncan) that is often called one of the most erotic silent films, despite only half of it surviving.
Borzage’s first sound picture, They Had to See Paris, starring popular entertainer Will Rogers, became one of Fox’s biggest hits of 1929.
Borzage’s first sound picture, They Had to See Paris (1929), starred popular entertainer Will Rogers and became one of Fox’s biggest hits of the year. Song o’ My Heart (1930) starred Irish tenor John McCormack as a great singer who retires to a small Irish village after the woman he loves marries another man. Liliom (1930), an adaptation of Hungarian author Ferenc Molnár’s play, starred Farrell.
Bad Girl (1931) was Borzage’s next important success. It tells a sentimental tale of a New York tenement couple (Sally Eilers and James Dunn) who meet, marry, and have a child in the span of a year. Bad Girl was nominated for Academy Awards for best picture, best director, and best adapted screenplay, though it won only for best director, which was Borzage’s second Oscar in that category. He made another comedy with Rogers, Young as You Feel (1931), and followed it with the Farrell drama After Tomorrow (1932) and one of Spencer Tracy’s early films, Young America (1932), which brought Borzage’s tenure at Fox to an end.
Freelancing after Fox
Borzage began freelancing, going to Paramount Pictures for the 1932 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, in which an American volunteer (Gary Cooper) is wounded while serving as an ambulance driver for the Italian army in World War I, an English nurse (Helen Hayes) restores him to health, and they fall wildly in love. Secrets (1933) was Mary Pickford’s last movie, a frontier soap opera with Leslie Howard as her unfaithful husband. Man’s Castle (1933) is a colorful romance, starring Tracy as a hard-boiled resident of New York’s “Hoover Flats” shantytown who takes in a homeless woman (Loretta Young); when she becomes pregnant, he decides to rob for her and their unborn child.
No Greater Glory (1934) is a sentimental tale of a boy (George Breakston) who overcomes his ill health to join a gang. Of more import was Little Man, What Now? (1934), with Margaret Sullavan and Douglass Montgomery as newlyweds navigating the difficulties of being poor in the Weimar Republic. Its sympathetic dramatization of the terrible conditions in Germany that made the Nazi movement so appealing was a first for a Hollywood production.
Warner Brothers tenure
Borzage then signed with Warner Brothers. He began his three-year tenure there with Flirtation Walk (1934), a musical starring Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler that is set at West Point. In Living on Velvet (1935), George Brent played a guilt-racked pilot who was responsible for the deaths of his family in a plane crash, and Kay Francis played the socialite who helps him face up to his trauma.
Stranded (1935) is a romance starring Brent and Francis set against the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, while Shipmates Forever (1935) is another Powell-Keeler musical. Hearts Divided (1936) paired Powell with Marion Davies in a musical set in the time of Napoleon. Desire (1936), one of Borzage’s most notable films, was made on loan to Paramount under the supervision (and strong influence) of production chief Ernst Lubitsch and starred Cooper as an American engineer on vacation in France who becomes a patsy for a glamorous jewel thief (Marlene Dietrich); as they chase each other around Spain, they fall in love.
Borzage made Desire under the supervision of Ernst Lubitsch. Released in 1936, it starred Gary Cooper as an engineer and Marlene Dietrich as a jewel thief.
Borzage left Warner Brothers after the quasi-religious medical drama Green Light (1937); Errol Flynn atypically was cast as a noble surgeon who sacrifices his own career to cover another doctor’s fatal mistake. History Is Made at Night (1937) is an ultraromantic melodrama. Charles Boyer played a fugitive from justice posing as a waiter aboard an ocean liner, Jean Arthur played the runaway socialite who falls in love with him, and Colin Clive played her jealous, murderous husband.
MGM tenure
Borzage then touched down at MGM, a studio that specialized in glossy material, though that was not immediately apparent from Big City (1937), a Warner-style yarn about a cabdriver (Tracy) who takes on organized crime after his pregnant wife (Luise Rainer) is accused of being an accomplice in a bombing of a rival cab company. Mannequin (1937) was more successful; in it a factory worker (Joan Crawford) rises from poverty to the upper reaches of society, thanks to the attentions of a shipping tycoon (Tracy).
In Three Comrades (1938), coscripted by F. Scott Fitzgerald from a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, three former soldiers (Robert Taylor, Robert Young, and Franchot Tone) suffer from abject poverty in Germany after World War I and fall in love with the same woman (Sullavan), who is dying of tuberculosis.
Borzage’s Strange Cargo (1940) is a parable starring Clark Gable, Peter Lorre, Paul Lukas, and Joan Crawford as characters who, while escaping from a penal colony, encounter God come to earth (Ian Hunter).
The Shining Hour (1938) starred Crawford as a nightclub dancer who marries into a wealthy family. Borzage was loaned to Paramount to make Disputed Passage (1939), about an older scientist (Akim Tamiroff) who advises his understudy (John Howard) that there can be no room for a wife (Dorothy Lamour) in the life of a true scientist. Back at MGM, Borzage was assigned to Strange Cargo (1940), a parable in which several convicts (among them Clark Gable, Peter Lorre, and Paul Lukas) and a saloon girl (Crawford) escaping from a South American penal colony are redeemed and changed by the spiritual influence of a new prisoner (Ian Hunter), who is God come to earth.
Borzage made a third film about German life, The Mortal Storm (1940), with James Stewart, Robert Young, Sullavan, and Frank Morgan as members of a family torn apart by the Nazis’ rise to power. Flight Command (1940) is a blend of sentimentality and aerial acrobatics, with Taylor starring as a young man who strives to excel as a navy pilot. Borzage then directed Smilin’ Through (1941), a musical remake starring Jeanette MacDonald of a melodrama that had been previously filmed in 1922 and 1932.
Borzage’s next assignment was The Vanishing Virginian (1942), a piece of nostalgic Americana starring character actor Morgan and newcomer Kathryn Grayson. Seven Sweethearts (1942) showcased Grayson’s spectacular soprano voice but marked the end of Borzage’s time at MGM. His star would continue to dim from that point on.
Later work
Borzage oversaw the all-star revue Stage Door Canteen (1943) at United Artists. Then came the Deanna Durbin vehicle His Butler’s Sister (1943), with Franchot Tone as a big-time Broadway composer who reluctantly agrees to take Durbin under his wing. Till We Meet Again (1944) is a wartime adventure about a cloistered nun (Barbara Britton) helping an American pilot (Ray Milland) escape from behind enemy lines by posing as his wife.
A departure from Borzage’s romances, The Spanish Main (1945) is a pirate movie starring Paul Henreid, Maureen O’Hara, and Walter Slezak. I’ve Always Loved You (1946) brought him to lowly Republic Studios, but, surprisingly, its love triangle between a young pianist (Catherine McLeod), her demanding teacher (Philip Dorn), and the farmer (Bill Carter) who has always loved her was an effective vehicle that highlighted Borzage’s technical skills.
I’ve Always Loved You (1946) brought Borzage to lowly Republic Studios. It was an effective vehicle that highlighted his technical skills.
Magnificent Doll (1946) was less fortunate; it starred Ginger Rogers as first lady Dolley Madison and was a commercial and critical failure. That’s My Man (1947) is an undistinguished racetrack drama with Don Ameche, but Moonrise (1948) shows Borzage’s old form, with Dane Clark as a hothead who accidentally murders an old enemy and Gail Russell as the dead man’s girlfriend who nonetheless tries to keep him connected to his humanity.
After Moonrise Borzage withdrew from filmmaking until China Doll (1958), a World War II romance in which an American pilot (Victor Mature) finds that, after a drunken night, he has acquired a Chinese housekeeper (Li Hua Li), with whom he then falls in love. The Big Fisherman (1959), made for Disney, is about the life of St. Peter (Howard Keel).
Legacy
Although Borzage is not as widely remembered today as his more famous contemporaries, such as John Ford and Howard Hawks, many critics consider him, at his best, to be their equal. In his greatest films, he celebrated the power of love to redeem those broken by their circumstances, and he found emotional and human truth in situations that in lesser hands would have seemed mawkish and preposterous.