For Chico and Diane's dramatic ascent to the apartment loft - the titular "7th Heaven" - a three-story elevator scaffold was constructed that would be able to follow the pair from the ground level to the apartment door on the top floor. The camera dollies forward onto an elevator platform and then is raised (via a system of ropes and pulleys) through the vertical set, viewing Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell as they climb the long spiral staircase, as though the viewer is passing through each floor on the ascent. Action is staged with background actors on various floors to give the impression that the set is a lived-in building, and a lighting gag (where Farrell lights a match in a darkened alcove) is used to mask a cut in order to give the audience the experience of a continuous, flowing camera movement up to the sky.
Received the most nominations of any film at the first Academy Awards ceremony, with five.
Although it was originally released as a traditional silent film, this movie became one of the first feature films with a recorded soundtrack when the Fox Film Corporation re-released it with a soundtrack utilizing the company's pioneering Movietone technology. This sound-on-film innovation had up until that point been used for newsreels and film shorts, and would give new life to this already successful film. The synced audio track here included a musical score by Erno Rapee as well as select use of sound effects, but no spoken dialog. (Many later silent film productions and re-releases would have dialog scenes dubbed or newly shot in order to capitalize on the sound movie craze.) The Movietone version of Settimo cielo (1927) was released on September 10, 1927. Warner Bros. breakthrough "talkie" film Il cantante di jazz (1927) hit theaters in October of that same year.
Janet Gaynor held the record of being the youngest woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress for nearly six decades. Her record would be broken by Marlee Matlin for her Oscar-winning performance in Figli di un dio minore (1986).
The 13th highest grossing silent film, taking in more than $2.5 million at the box office in 1927.