Tonight I Am the Bank of France
7th Heaven (1927)
directed by Frank Borzage
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
7th Heaven begins in a sewer beneath Paris, where Chico longs for the street washer's life above ground. War is imminent, but girls occupy his daydreams. When one shows up, Chico thinks her brown hair and cowardly disposition are a joke from the god who doesn't answer his prayers, but a priest intervenes and, like Jaqen H'ghar from A Song of Ice and Fire, leaves Chico with a few "religious medals."
That priest could well be Borzage himself, never one to leave a man and woman alone to fall simply in secular love. Paris looks like something from The Arabian Nights - minarets and chimney spires - and the skyline above Chico's apartment looks like a matte painting... until Chico disappears into it. The "climbing the stairs/falling in love" sequence is as light as a balloon, ever rising to the blue French sky, in spite of the director's leaden insistence that all this be a metaphor for more than an airy heart.
In the wake of their chance encounter, Chico rashly gives the girl a place to stay and hide from her sister. He steals a few sheets off a neighbor's line for a nightgown, and the next day Diane gets right to work at playing house. They go out at night on a drunk's rickety streetcar, and along their narrow pathways above the city marvel at the carefree life of an honest working man. That changes, of course, and someone has to go blind before God makes His Glory known, but there are moments when the movie anticipates L'Atalante for the sort of transcendence I prefer, which is a beautiful woman in the modern world beneath an empty moon.
directed by Frank Borzage
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
7th Heaven begins in a sewer beneath Paris, where Chico longs for the street washer's life above ground. War is imminent, but girls occupy his daydreams. When one shows up, Chico thinks her brown hair and cowardly disposition are a joke from the god who doesn't answer his prayers, but a priest intervenes and, like Jaqen H'ghar from A Song of Ice and Fire, leaves Chico with a few "religious medals."
That priest could well be Borzage himself, never one to leave a man and woman alone to fall simply in secular love. Paris looks like something from The Arabian Nights - minarets and chimney spires - and the skyline above Chico's apartment looks like a matte painting... until Chico disappears into it. The "climbing the stairs/falling in love" sequence is as light as a balloon, ever rising to the blue French sky, in spite of the director's leaden insistence that all this be a metaphor for more than an airy heart.
In the wake of their chance encounter, Chico rashly gives the girl a place to stay and hide from her sister. He steals a few sheets off a neighbor's line for a nightgown, and the next day Diane gets right to work at playing house. They go out at night on a drunk's rickety streetcar, and along their narrow pathways above the city marvel at the carefree life of an honest working man. That changes, of course, and someone has to go blind before God makes His Glory known, but there are moments when the movie anticipates L'Atalante for the sort of transcendence I prefer, which is a beautiful woman in the modern world beneath an empty moon.
posted by NPK at 3:32 AM
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