Erik Visits an American Grave Part 1,515

This is the grave of Frank Borzage.

Born in 1894 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Frank Borzaga was the son of a Italian immigrant miner and his Swiss wife. There’s a lot more coal mining in Utah than you think, even today, so it made sense that his parents had gone from the anthracite fields of northeast Pennsylvania to Wyoming and then to Utah, where Frank was born. Interestingly, although the family was Catholic and had 14 children for that many, Borzaga was friends with a lot of Mormons and helped them build a bunch of temples, and not just for the work. Maybe it was the large family thing.

Anyway, Borzage, which itself does not seem like a simpler name than Borzaga and I am not sure why he changed it, got interested in acting as a child and his parents seem to have been OK with it, unlike many other examples from this series. The family didn’t have any money of course, and so he had to support himself if he was going to go into acting. He did it the family way–mining. He was mining silver up around Park City in order to pay for his acting lessons back in Salt Lake City. Not an easy way to make it happen. He started joining theater troupes and traveled around the West acting. This would be the kind of small town acting thing that one can imagine from a lot of westerns–how good these people were or how respectful the audiences were I imagine varied enormously. But he traveled in Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, all over the place.

Then Borzage ended up in California. By this time, the movies were starting to move to Los Angeles. This was the early 1910s. He had joined a new theater company, they went to LA, and he quit there to work in the movies. At first, he was just an actor. But in this era, when the movies were far from the consolidated studio system they would become, it wasn’t that hard to get behind the camera, really do about anything. So while he worked as an actor until 1917, beginning in 1915, he started directing films and this is what would make him famous.

The vast majority of his early films are lost. Most were shorts. His second film, The Pitch O’Chance, has survived, and it looks like a pretty typical western of the time. He worked all the time though. He has 107 films to his name as director, including many per year in the late 1910s and early 20s, though he would work at a frenetic pace for years into the sound era. By the late 20s, he became one of the great romantic directors of Hollywood, learning a ton from F.W. Murnau, who had gone to Hollywood himself by that time. Borzage’s 1927 film 7th Heaven, a drama with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, won Borzage the first ever Best Director honor in the Academy Awards. It’s a big enough deal in film history that the National Film Registry included it back in 1995. He worked with Gaynor and Farrell frequently in the late 20s, in a series of successful pictures including Street Angel and Lucky Star.

Borzage transitioned to sound really easily, unlike many directors. He really was one of the leading lights of Hollywood in the 1930s. His specialty was young lovers overcoming adversity. Given that some of that adversity was World War I, he had a lot of rich material to work with. This leads me to 1932’s A Farewell to Arms, which I certainly consider to the best film adaptation of Hemingway’s work. Gary Cooper is great in the lead and Helen Hayes and Adolphe Menjou are also fantastic. This was also a key turning point in his career, as he had just gotten out of his long-term contract and had more independence. But of course that also meant that he was at a risk of not getting the work he wanted. Interestingly, Hemingway didn’t like the film because it was too romantic. Of course the misogynist crank wouldn’t like that. But Borzage said to the end of his life that this was the best film he ever made.

Other key films Borzage later made includes History is Made at Night in 1937, a superb and slightly changed Titanic story with Charles Boyer and Jean Arthur. He also was the Hollywood filmmaker most willing to take on the rise of the Nazis in the late 30s. This was a period where even the Jewish studio heads, outside of the Warner Brothers to some extent, were scared of approaching these issues on screen. That includes the 1938 film Three Comrades, adapted from a Erich Maria Remarque film about three friends during World War I and the aftermath, including the rise of the Nazis. Then an even more direct attack on the Nazis came in 1940 with The Mortal Storm, with Margaret Sullavan and Jimmy Stewart and with a broad supporting cast that included Robert Young, Robert Stack, Ward Bond, and many others, and which is about a “non-Aryan” professor in a German university and how he is attacked in the immediate aftermath of Hitler’s rise. Interesting to me that a master of romance would also become a political filmmaker at a time few would take on these subjects.

Borzage began to slip in the 40s. He worked less frequently, he was getting older, and what work that did come out wasn’t really that great, with the exception of the 1948 noir Moonrise, with Dane Clark and Gail Russell. He didn’t work a whole lot after that generally, though he did do a little TV in the mid 50s. Toward the end, he received tons of awards, perhaps because people realized he wasn’t going to be that long for the world with his health and of course also because he was such a master.

By the early 60s, Borzage was fighting cancer and losing that battle. He was in the hospital in early 1962 when he received the word that he had won the D.W. Griffith Award, which is today Directors Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award. You can see why they would change the name of it, which happened in 1999. This is not given out every year either. In fact, most years it is not. It would be another five years before anyone got the award. He died a few months later, at the age of 68.

Now, if you really want to get into Borzage, let me recommend the excellent introduction to the Borzage series on Criterion Channel from a few years ago by our friend Farran Smith Nehme. She points out his distinct approach to visuals to help move the emotional heft of the films forward. She also discusses in depth how and why he was such a master of the romance and his central theme that love was the reason to live. That was a great series and of course Criterion Channel is one of the things that makes life worth living to me.

Frank Borzage is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.

And may all of you watch some good movies this Christmas, especially if you are avoiding family! Ho Ho Ho Merry Grave Christmas!!!

If you would like this series to visit other winners of the Griffith Award, you can donate to cover the required expenses here, as if anyone has any money left to spend after the Christmas season. George Stevens is in Hollywood and Frank Capra is in Coachella, California. I need to spend more time in LA I guess, so many graves to visit! Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.