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5.0 out of 5 stars
"I work in the sewers, but I live near the stars." Chico to Diane, March 8, 2010
"I'm not used to being happy...It's funny--It hurts!" -- Janet Gaynor (Diane)
Seventh Heaven is a masterpiece of romantic sentimentality, and is one of the finest of its kind made during the silent era of film. A timeless masterpiece of silent art, it remains as beautiful today as it was in 1927. Its director, Frank Borzage, was the greatest romanticist the movies have ever had, and its female star, Janet Gaynor, its most embraced waif. Their two films made together, Seventh Heaven and Street Angel, helped both win Academy Awards.
While Murnau's Sunrise, made at the same time as Seventh Heaven, is today embraced by critics as an artistic masterpiece, it actually rode the popular coattails of Borzage's Seventh Heaven. While both are triumphs of filmmaking, Seventh Heaven was by far the more commercially successful, and was adored by the public of the day. Borzage's lyricism in capturing true love was astounding, and reached its zenith in this silent masterwork. His films portrayed couples as if living in a netherworld where love resided in purity, untouched by the harsh world around it.
Frank Borzage was a pioneer of the soft focus look, and the lush photography of Ernest Palmer and J.A.Valentine encouraged by the director blended perfectly with the tender nature of Austin Strong's stage play. This romantic framing transformed the simple story of a lowly sewer worker and an abused waif in the slums of Paris during the 1920's into one of the most beautiful and sensitive romances the screen has ever seen.
The two stars, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, became "America's Favorite Lovebirds" making ten more movies in the following seven years till 1934. In Seventh Heaven Farrell portrays the vibrant, optimistic sewer worker, Chico, who dreams of the world above, and of rising to become a street washer like Gobin (David Butler). Diane (Janet Gaynor) is honest but forced by her abusive sister to live a debauched life that she longs to escape. In this role, Gaynor is not only sweet and endearing, but has an earthy sensuality seldom associated with her innocent countenance. There is despair and longing in her early moments, her soul damaged and her prospects for happiness dark.
'High above the streets and sewers, in Chico's seventh floor dwelling, the two fall in love in their `seventh heaven'. It happens with a charm and tenderness unique to silent films and never again reached when sound came along. The sentimental brush strokes Borzage used to paint the love between Chico and Diane are on every frame of nitrate, painting a picture of romance today's world may have lost, but which still lives on in films like Seventh Heaven.
Borzage's Seventh Heaven was the beginning of a trilogy of sorts about love and war which extended to sound, Seventh Heaven dealing with a pure and otherworldly love intruded upon by WWI. Five years later, he would use his sentimental brush again in A Farewell to Arms, showing a love found amidst the Great War and doomed by it. Six years later he would paint his picture of pure love in the aftermath of World War I, showing the time it stole from people, in Three Comrades, as yet another war loomed on the horizon. The Great War intruding upon deep and romantic love in its purest form is a recurring theme in his films.
Seventh Heaven is the most unabashedly romantic of the three, and one must see this film to really appreciate the fresh and pure ray of light it shines on faith and love. It is beautifully sentimental and startlingly wonderful. A must see film classic.
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