Film critic Kenneth Turan asked an excellent question in his book Never Coming to a Theater Near You: A Celebration of a Certain Kind of Movie: "Who knows Frank Borzage? [..] Once his pictures were among the most popular ever produced, with his name in gigantic letters above the title. He won two best-director Oscars®, one of the few directors to do so for both silent and sound films. And now? In but a few generations Borzage and his films have become as forgotten as Nineveh and Tyre. Though shelves groan with multiple titles on John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles, the best English language treatment of Borzage's work remains a small bilingual film journal published in Italy more than a decade ago. Who can explain it? [...] So why is Borzage, in this age of thriving romance novels and Soap Opera Digest, the man nobody knows? The answer is a complex one, starting with the reality that the intensity of feeling Borzage felt in the marrow of his being is so out of favor today that it's best described, to borrow a phrase from another world, as Xtreme Emotion, romance with all the stops pulled out."

Dismissing Borzage's work as melodramatic is unfair as melodrama was an integral part of movie making when he first got his start in the early 1910's. The films he made (like those of his contemporaries) were created for an audience light years removed from today's reality-TV watchers. As Turan so rightly put it, "If you like to cry at movies Borzage will make it happen. If you don't believe in Really Big Love you probably shouldn't even be in the room."

Frank Borzage was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on April 23, 1893 as one of the fourteen children of coal miner Luigi Borzage and his Swiss-born wife Maria Ruegg, who had emigrated to the United States from what was when known as Austria-Hungary. Of the fourteen, eight would survive childhood, including his brothers Lew, who would be a well-respected assistant director and Danny, who became a member of John Ford's stock company of actors. As a young teenager Borzage worked mining silver to earn money to take a correspondence course in acting, which became his principal profession in 1909 after spending three years as a prop boy with a theatrical touring company. Life as an itinerant actor was hard and Borzage often found himself sleeping in boxcars and tents. Eventually he made his way to Hollywood and the emerging film industry. Having joined Thomas Ince's company he got his start playing bit roles in silent films for $5 a day. Borzage remained with Ince for several years, appearing in an astounding 112 films in only six years.

While still an actor, Borzage began to direct films in 1913, making his debut with the Wallace Reid film The Mystery of Yellow Aster Mine for the short-lived Bison Motion Picture Company. By 1918 he had given up acting for directing, except for a brief appearance as himself in the 1957 film Jeanne Eagels. Most of his early efforts were in Westerns, which was not surprising because in those days Westerns could be shot quickly and cheaply almost anywhere in Southern California. As Frederick Lamster wrote in his book Souls Made Great Through Love and Adversity: The Film Work of Frank Borzage, Westerns offered Borzage the opportunity for simple and effective story-telling. "Evils and conflicts were completely externalized, and the actions taken against such negative forces were direct and decisive (e.g. gunfights). With social upheavals and spiritual crises personalized and acted upon, the private fears and emotional upsets of the viewing audience were by extension laid to rest as well."

Borzage's first real hit was Humoresque (1920) (which would be remade twenty-six years later with Joan Crawford and John Garfield), a story about a Jewish violinist's struggle for success. Photoplay Magazine voted it the best film of the year. Frank Borzage worked constantly throughout the 1920s including an extended period at William Fox's Fox Film Corporation (before it merged with Twentieth Century in 1935) where he made what was arguably his best work with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in several films including the Academy Award nominated, Seventh Heaven (1927). Second only to The Jazz Singer (1927), it was the biggest box office hit of that year. The Jazz Singer made more money because it was the first full-length motion picture with sound dialogue sequences, yet it isn't screened at film festivals today the way Seventh Heaven is. Melodrama, perhaps, but it was also a silent film. Without the benefit of dialogue, directors had to rely on stronger emotions to get the story across. That Borzage was able to tell the unlikely story of a Parisian garbage collector who marries an equally penniless girl, is blinded in the war and returns to her after she believes he is dead; and yet still move a modern audience to tears rather than derisive laughter is a tribute to his skill. As his own cameraman Ernest Palmer said years later, "He had the most marvelous touch, especially when you'd get a boy and girl together." His peers evidently agreed as Borzage was the first film director to win an Academy Award for Seventh Heaven, which was handed out at the inaugural ceremony on May 16, 1929 at the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. In 1995 the film was voted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Borzage would win one other Oscar® in 1932 for Bad Girl (1931).

For a director labeled as a romanticist, Borzage's political sense was acute. In the years leading up to World War II, he created films that were blatantly anti-Nazi: Three Comrades (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1940), which were so powerful that they contributed to the decision by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, to ban American films in Germany and the territories it occupied. It was a brave move by Borzage and by Hollywood not only because it meant a considerable loss of profits but they risked alienating a not insignificant portion of the domestic audience who was either sympathetic to Hitler or who preferred to remain neutral. The events of December 7th 1941 would make the point moot.

After 1940 Borzage's career (and his personal life) went into a decline. Professionally he was relegated to forgettable films such as His Butler's Sister (1943) and to working at the low budget Republic Pictures. No artist remains at the top of their form forever but Borzage was still relatively young - in his fifties - when things went downhill. Part of the blame could be put on a drinking problem or a broken heart caused by his first wife, the actress Rena Rogers. Borzage was deeply in love with his wife but she, by her own admission, did not feel the same. Her affairs with both men and women and her revelation that she'd had an abortion nearly destroyed him. He finally walked out on her on their 24th anniversary and they divorced in 1941 with Rena receiving $250,000. While he married twice more and found happiness with his third wife, Rena was the love of his life and supposedly the inspiration for many of his film heroines. It has been suggested that Borzage created an ideal on screen which he could not find in life with Rena: waif-like tiny women with a core of steel as exemplified by actresses like Loretta Young and Janet Gaynor. Perhaps he saw himself and Rena in all the young lovers facing hardships who seemed to populate so many of his films? For all that Borzage's films have been called melodramatic, they are not saccharine. For such a romantic director, he certainly understood the pain of love.

Frank Borzage ended his career directing a few Screen Director's Playhouse episodes for television and ironically his final film - a contribution to Edgar Ulmer's L'Atlantide (1961) was uncredited. In a sense it seems to foreshadow the fate that Borzage's reputation suffered after his death from cancer at the age of sixty-eight, in 1962. In 2006 a touring retrospective of Borzage's films, Flesh and Desire: The Films of Frank Borzage appears to have been instrumental in helping to stir up interest in his work once again.

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:
Never Coming to a Theater Near You: A Celebration of a Certain Kind of Movie by Kenneth Turan
Souls Made Great Through Love and Adversity: The Film Work of Frank Borzage by Frederick Lamster
The Internet Movie Database
Wikipedia.org Slant Magazine Review Flesh and Desire: The Films of Frank Borzage