Street Angel (1928)

Silent Romance. - Street Angel review by Steve

The middle part of Borzage's celebrated trilogy of romantic melodramas starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell in the late silent era. The street angels are sex workers and the film relates Gaynor's luckless attempts to escape the poverty and iniquity of her birth to nurture her love for Farrell's guileless, uncompromised artist. It takes place in a Naples of the imagination, a distant place of great passions and tragic fate.

 Occasionally it can feel that there is little happening on screen other than the wonderful magic that is created by the two stars. For me, Farrell and Gaynor have become the great screen couple of early cinema. These were hyper-romantic films of people on the outside of society, down on their luck, but not easily giving up on their dreams. Their enduring chemistry and the fragility of their love in the face of an agonising destiny, remains very compelling still.

 Their films together usually end on an uplift, but we really believe more in the tragedy. Love can never be enough to beat off the curse of fate in a brutal world of pitiless injustice and poverty. It is easy to see how these wonderful melodramas found their way into the hearts of an audience sinking into the depression.

 When Gaynor is torn away from Farrell and put into jail, they are both whistling an Italian ballad on the Movietone soundtrack, like two birds who would die if separated. It's that intense. The setting is richly atmospheric, with vast constructions of foggy harbour-side slums explored by Borzage's inquisitive, mobile camera. Its narrative credibility is sometimes compromised, but this is a spiritual film, where love is just a transient moment of joy glimpsed against an endless panorama of sorrow.