Sétimo Céu

Two scenes stick out in my mind.

1. Janet Gaynor walking across the plank into the apartment where Chico is waiting. She looks like an angel descending to earth.

2. The crane shot where the two lovers run up the stairs to the seventh floor (seventh heaven). This is a place where the two are isolated from the rest of the world and time stands still.

This love story is so much a product of its' era, a time of innocence and charm. The leads, Gaynor and Farrell, are simply perfect as the lovers who are parted by World War I. Janet Gaynor is beautiful and Charles Farrell is handsome. SEVENTH HEAVEN has it all: prostitution, romance, war, a sadistic whipping, and religion. It is melodramatic, to be sure, but this is part of the charm. It is a winner of multiple 1st Academy Awards, and deserves to be seen on DVD in a Fox release. Perhaps if we wrote to Fox Home Entertainment. They allowed that abysmal tape of SEVENTH HEAVEN to be circulated by Critics Choice. It's time to correct a bad judgment.

This could have been something awful. It's high schmaltz, really fever-pitched melodrama, and the plot relies on a huge number of coincidences. But it all works beautifully, through a perfect combination of acting, directing, and photography, not to mention the incredible lighting and set design. This is one of the great silent movies, and one of the great screen romances. Janet Gaynor had quite a year in 1927, turning in fantastic performances in this, as well as F. W. Murnau's Sunrise. 10/10

A year later, Buster Keaton in The Cameraman would do a brilliant spoof of the famous staircase crane shot from Seventh Heaven.

7th Heaven (1927)

Coming at the end of the silent era, we might expect a film of the highest order in that silent era sense, untainted by sound, depending on gesture and action to keep the plot going. And Seventh Heaven really is a great film. It's complex, subtle, beautiful, and not clunky, not a bit what some people picture when they think of silent films.

It also is a great love story. Janet Gaynor was becoming a big star (she won best actress for this performance among others that year) and her counterpart Charles Farrell is a convincing charming actor. It's Paris 1914 when we begin, and that's not half bad. Then there are some early versions of the war, including some scenes with flame throwers that ought to surprise everyone.

What becomes of our two leads as they struggle to stay together during all this is for you to see, but it's told with economy (even at two hours the movie never drags) and with touching honesty. The director, Frank Borzage, made a whole bunch of good films during the 1930s, in the sound era, but this shows a real mastery of the earlier basics of cinema. Credit also goes also the cinematographer Ernest Palmer, a lesser known veteran who made the most of a lot of great sets and a range of interior and exterior scenes. Keep an eye on that, especially a moment toward the beginning where the camera follows the actors up the circular stairs, floor after floor, seamlessly. This will be echoed with perfection at the end of the film, so it's not just showing off.

And keep some Kleenex handy. It'll get to you.

Much has been made of Murnau, but I'm more impressed by Borzage.

Yes, the subject matter is more lowbrow, but it is also more fully integrated into the cinematic flow, perhaps as a result.

I'm told this is his best in terms of what impresses me: the integration of space.

Nearly every shot is framed, not in two dimensions by three. There's impressive use of vertical space as well, even incorporating it into the story. Though the story is simple (love, war, return) it has certain narrative elements that bind it to space, and these aren't afterthoughts but essential elements of the story that rest easily in the big holes left by melodrama.

The love nest is literally on the seventh floor. Our hero literally starts in the sewer. He is elevated by intercession of the church, which provides him with a pair of religious medals. If the sewer-heaven dimension is vertical, these medals provide for horizontal space overlay via a sort of spiritually pure love — each day at 11.

But the space idea is carried in every frame as well. Its not layers like Kurosawa with give us. Nor a camera that would explore and define space like Hitchcock — the camera is stationary here. But its deep.

Gaynor is impressive.

Oh, and it has that most spatial of drugs: absinthe.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.