The final part of Borzage's trilogy of silent romantic melodramas starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell is probably the best. The leads are adorable and there is an endearing touch of comedy this time.
Gaynor plays an uneducated, primitive country girl who falls in love with Farrell who has just returned from the Great War. He instructs her in the rudiments of manners and hygiene and uncovers the lovely, maturing woman within... There's a quite charming scene where he washes her hair over and over until he discovers she's a blonde.
Though of course, with this being a Borzage production, fate isn't quite that benign. Farrell has an accident in France and comes back a paraplegic, and so is placed in the agonising position of improving Gaynor for the benefit of his mendacious and irresponsible Sergeant who partly brought about the injury. OK, Farrell's recovery just in time to save his sweetheart from a disastrous marriage is most improbable, but that's the transformative potential of true love in the world of silent cinema...
Borzage's work at its best has a spiritual quality; it is a beautiful visual expression of ethereal romance. Sure, it could be sentimental, but it communicates a strange, intangible sense of the supernatural, of the out-of body. Of the soul as it struggles to survive the physical world.