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Frank Borzage Biography

Frank Borzage

(Salt Lake City, 1893-Hollywood, 1962) American film director.Frank Borzage occupies a very special place among the many artisans who populated classic Hollywood, capable of leaping from the western to war films or sophisticated comedies, displaying a narrative efficiency and technical knowledge worthy of admiration.The uniqueness of this filmmaker lies in the fact that, even knowing how to excellently perform the role of a simple worker at the service of a complex industrial machinery, he always knew how to maintain constants of visual style characterized by the poetic sensitivity of his images and the romanticism of his staging.

Director of about a hundred films, Borzage is especially known as the signer of a handful of excellent romantic melodramas that are among the best in the history of cinema, in the case of Human torrents or The seventh heaven , although his figure is still somewhat obscured by other great filmmakers of the genre such as John M.Stahl or Douglas Sirk.

Actor with a solid training theater, Frank Borzage ended up in the world of cinema thanks to Thomas H.Ince, who in the middle of the stage crisis offered him the opportunity to work in a medium that was just taking its first steps.Due to the bad press that the cinema had among certain bourgeois elites, Borzage decided to camouflage his name under a pseudonym so that, once what he considered a fleeting stage was over, he could return to the theater without being marked as a performer.

However, very soon he began to be interested in directing and, already in 1913, just a year after having made the leap to Hollywood, he directed a serial western as The Mistery of the Yellow Aster Mine .From that moment on, he began an extensive career within the Western film genre, which made him one of the leading specialists in the silent period.However, the first feature film that brought him some fame was Humoresque (1920), a romantic fable where Borzage began to show himself as a director attentive to the smallest details and close to the baroque.

At the end of the twenties, and still in full silence, two feature films definitely catapulted him to fame: The Seventh Heaven (1927) and The Street Angel (1928).The modernity of its production, at times close to certain postulates of the French avant-garde and also influenced by German expressionist cinema, earned it warm praise from critics and the public, thus becoming one of the most promising values ​​in Hollywood.

These films also served to highlight an idea that ran through Borzage's entire work from that moment: individual freedom goes through the achievement of an unattainable love, as a feeling that no one can achieve by full.All this framed in sordid and misery environments, such as The Angel of the Street , which brought him closer to the cinema of his admired George W.Pabst, and where the photographic game with chiaroscuro was decisive.In this sense The seventh heaven will be the highest point of this aesthetic, through an effective game of contrasts with elements such as religion, poverty or love, to end up creating a work very close to the hyper-realistic tendencies.

The 1930s were especially marked by the so-called "German trilogy" composed of What now? (1934), Three Comrades (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1939), where politics enters society fully, like a cancer that corrupts everything.Frank Borzage showed the devastating effects of the rise to power of totalitarianisms such as the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, with which he also made a call for solidarity as a substitute for universal love.However, viewers opted instead for other films with an infinitely more baroque tone, such as the sophisticated Mannequin (1938) or that authentic hymn to love sentiment that was Desire (1936), one of the crowning works of Borzage's successful career and by extension of the entire history of cinema.

The pirate adventure film The Spanish Main (1945 ) signaled a turning point in its trajectory.The economic failure of this feature film, which will be followed by others no less striking, such as the one suffered the following year with The great passion (a Mannerist film that repeated his style features although without the verve or beauty of previous proposals), ended up causing him to leave the cinema for almost a decade.Upon his return, things had changed dramatically and Frank Borzage could not accommodate himself to the new times, so titles such as China Doll (1958) and The Great Fisherman (1959) were closer to being a vindication of past times than a commitment to modernity, as had been a good part of his previous filmography.

In his decline as a filmmaker, he hardly received offers from a certain interest.In this situation, he chose to accept the direction of an Italian peplum , Antinea, l'amante della città sepolta (1961), whose filming he had, however, to abandon after two o'clock.weeks after end-stage cancer is detected.Edgar G.Ulmer and Giuseppe Massini replaced him as directors.

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