secondtake Street Angel (1928)What a great surprise!Just as sound was all the talk and all the necessity of Hollywood, and just as Fox Studios has released a quasi-sound masterpiece in the fall of 1927 called "Sunrise," a few months later comes "Street Angel" continuing in a silent mode from Fox's great director Frank Borzage. And it's lively, fast, well acted, and frankly terrific.Janet Gaynor above all, like Lilian Gish in her films, lifts this story through sheer acting and screen presence. She's a live wire and a tender victim, a fun and emotional and interesting person. This comes across without the supposed exaggerations of silent cinema, and is enough to make you forget the silence completely. Her partner in all this, Charles Farrell, is also good, though a bit stiff and pretty like Gary Cooper would be a decade later.Equally terrific is the filming--the photography and editing, and the necessary set design and atmospheric effects (night, fog, great heights, tiny rooms). Photographer Ernest Palmer had already made a slew of films at Fox and was at the top of his game, and he had just worked with Borzage (and Gaynor and Farrell) in the equally well made "7th Heaven" the year before. It's beautiful, glowing, subtle stuff.The plot? More interesting that you'd expect at first, and more complex, though with a strand of inevitable sweetness, too. The title refers to a prostitute, and streetwalking girls are a recurring part of the film, from the fringes. The place is Italy in the 1920s, and Gaynor plays Angela who turns to the street to try to get enough money to save her mother's life. Things quickly spin out of control from there, with jail and a small time circus and a life of impoverishment in Naples for our two leads. Temporarily. Farrell plays a painter with some talent but imperfect ambition and no business sense, so promise turns to heartache. And then things shift again.If there is anything constant in this movie it is the good inner souls of the main characters, and so you suspect they will at least have a chance of surviving the hardship that seems to never quite be their own fault. I'm sure most of the audience identified with that then, just as I could now. The scenes are really dramatic, the interactions between the actors completely fresh and honest, and the photography fluid and modern. Yes, it's a sentimental "old" movie, still, of course, but with so much going on so well, you'll be glad.

herb-924-148734 This one has the strengths and weaknesses of the late silent films. It is not as good as 'Sunrise,' but it has some wonderful b/w deep field shots, with a distant town down a mountainside and a busy harbor for a background. Also -- some fine Monet-like fogbound portside shots with the characters walking in silhouette toward each other. Some of the scenes are too long and too sentimental -- to show off Janet Gaynor's skill at pathos, and the theme music and whistling is badly overused. But the portrait, which becomes "Madonnaized" as an old master does capture Gaynor's pure character. It is taken from the lovers as her purity is (for the time being) stolen from her, but then in the final scene the image and reality are reunited. In a sense the Madonna blesses the two reunited lovers. That's well done and is reminiscent of the use of portraits in Poe's "Oval Portrait" and Wilde's "Picture of Doran Grey." I wonder how the young artist realized that it was his picture or, if he did, registered no surprise at finding it over the altar of a church. But the use of the picture as a kind of psychic energy was carried through nicely.

dbdumonteil Frank Borzage's films often take place in Europa ."Seventh Heaven" took the audience to France before and during WW1.And in the talkies era ,many of his works were depictions of Germany("Little Man What Now?" "Three Comrades" "Mortal Storm" )."Street Angel" is a Neapolitan effort.The follow -up to "Seventh Heaven" ,with the same actors ,its first part is a bit erratic,recalling "Heaven" but without its focus and its intensity.But by the second third ,the movie really takes off ;it grabs you when Gino and Angela move into their small apartment in Napoli.And when the girl,about to be arrested,is given one hour's grace,Borzage's movie turns sublime.This hour ...this hour....If it were only for that scene,Janet Gaynor would deserve her AA hands down.This is really one of the most beautiful love scenes I have ever seen: you should see the actress smile ,laugh through her tears ,her intense happiness which she knows will be short-lived: and doing that without any words is a feat which is even more impressive today.Other remarkable scenes: When Angela is in Jail ,and Gino is desperately searching for her,the director makes a stunning use of the shadows.The misty harbor "where there are plenty of them (street angels)" where the lovers meet again.And last but not least ,the painting ("You should not have sold it,it was our guardian angel" ) which plays a prominent part in the plot ;the final harrowing scene in the church is Gina's redemption.A sequence to rival the best of Murnau's "Daybreak" .Frank Borzage is the poet of the lovers who've got to fight against a hostile world."On the street ,you will find people whose love and pain make great" the director tells us before his story begins.

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre In the first year of the Academy Awards, the voting was based on the performer's entire body of work for that year. Thus, Emil Jannings won the first Best Actor Oscar (although they weren't cried 'Oscar' yet) for two films he made in 1928, whilst Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress Oscar for three films she made that year. One of her three films was 'Street Angel', so her starring role in this film has to be reckoned as one-third of an Oscar-winning performance. But surely Gaynor's magnificent and multi-layered performance in 'Sunrise' deserves most of the credit for that award. 'Sunrise' is such a masterpiece, it's hard to see how 'Street Angel' could compare with it.This film takes place in Naples, where 'street angel' is apparently the term for a prostitute. Janet Gaynor usually played virginal good girls. Here, she gets arrested for prostitution. Impressively, the script avoids the easy excuse of making Gaynor a victim of mistaken arrest. Instead, through clever but plausible script machinations, Gaynor's heroine has legitimate reasons for feeling some guilt and stigma for being a prostitute while making it clear to the audience that she hasn't actually done the deed. As an Italian peasant girl, Gaynor impressively uses Neapolitan hand gestures and head movements in a few scenes, but does not employ them consistently.As to leading man Charles Farrell, the less said the better. Gaynor and Farrell were the most popular romantic team in silent films, but I've always found Farrell impossibly good-looking without the acting ability to match. His portrayal of an embittered paraplegic in 'Lucky Star' is his only performance that deeply impressed me.Gaynor typically played good-girl roles (in an interview, she noted 'I was the essence of first love'), so I was pleasantly surprised by her appearance here in a circus costume that shows off her exquisite figure in black tights and leotard. While Gaynor balances upside-down, the camera lingers from her slipper-shod feet downwards along her extended legs to her torso. What a woman! Gaynor, who usually dressed much more modestly, is clearly delighted to have this chance to show her stuff.The production design is exquisite, with dozens of highly individualised stucco buildings. They actually look like a street in Naples, not a movie set. Henry Armetta restrains his histrionics, for once. Natalie Kingston is enticing as a local slut named Lisetta. In his brief role as an Auguste-style circus clown, I was very impressed with an obscure actor named Louis Liggett, who died shortly after this film was released: he shows real talent here.The plot of this film is soap-opera bathos; the most interesting thing about it is that Gaynor's character serves a year in the workhouse (conveniently getting sprung on the same day as her rival, Lisetta, even though the latter was arrested much later) and then she emerges wearing a surprisingly stylish pair of high-heeled pumps: are these prison-issue in Italy? I'll rate this movie 5 out of 10, mostly for Gaynor's nuanced performance and partly for the brief scenes of her performing in black tights.