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Read about this retrospective in the Los Angeles Times.
The abiding theme of director Frank Borzage’s work could be summarized as “love conquers all.” For Hollywood’s great romantic, though, this was no untested ideal. Borzage’s characters discover, again and again, that love, truly experienced, means living without fear and Borzage (1894-1962), reflecting his times, gave them much to be afraid of. While sweeping camera movements, soft-focus photography and sublime mise-en-scene are the recurring hallmarks that sustain the private worlds his lovers create for themselves, their reveries are born amid all manner of frankly-presented modern blight, from war to privation, that together, they come to transcend. It’s why so many of Borzage’s films play not only like romantic fantasies but also like stiff shots to the arm. In many ways, it could be argued, it is love that has kept much of Borzage’s celluloid legacy alive. Of the 105 films Borzage directed, from the two-reeler The Pitch o’ Chance in 1915 to the Biblical epic The Big Fisherman in 1959, it is estimated that almost half have been lost. Some of those that survive, including such key works as The River (1929) or The Nth Commandment (1923), exist as incomplete reconstructions. When UCLA Film & Television Archive first devoted a career retrospective to Borzage in 1987, the accompanying program notes argued that “the number of lost titles would undoubtedly be much higher if it weren’t for the role played by the nation’s film archives in collecting and preserving our common motion picture heritage.” The Archive is proud to have contributed to this global effort in regards to Borzage’s extraordinary career having preserved 10 of Borzage’s feature films, including Humoresque (1920), Liliom (1930) and A Farewell to Arms (1932). As part of our 50th Anniversary celebration, we return again to Borzage to present all of his films the Archive has restored, along with many more classics in tribute to one of the most distinctive stylists in American cinema history.
