'Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans' Plot Intro
An unnamed husband (George O’Brien) living in a rural community has an extra-marital affair with a city femme fatale (Margaret Livingston). The two then plot to murder the husband’s pious wife (Janet Gaynor). But will he go through with it?
'7th Heaven' Plot Intro
Diane (Janet Gaynor) is a weak-willed young woman with an abusive, alcoholic older sister. To escape her, Diane ends up pretending to be married to a dashing street-cleaner named Chico (Charles Farrell). As the two begin to genuinely fall in love, war suddenly tears them asunder…
'Street Angel' Plot Intro
Angela (Janet Gaynor) is forced to resort to prostitution to pay for her ailing mother’s medicine. But when the police catch her, she has to flee and join a troupe of circus performers. She falls in love with a painter named Gino (Charles Farrell) but her past returns to haunt her…
Picture it! Hollywood, 1929. We’re back at the first ever Academy Awards and epic war movie Wings takes the coveted Best Picture crown. Meanwhile, Janet Gaynor made history by becoming the first person to win Best Actress, an award that’s seen the likes of Streep, Fonda, Dunaway and both Hepburns literally tearing each other apart just to get a nomination. Yes, in my world, the Oscars is basically The Hunger Games.
At the remarkably young age of 22, Gaynor also remained the youngest actress to win the award for nearly six decades. She is also the only winner to win for more than one film. For the first three ceremonies, actors and actresses were nominated for their body of work throughout the year rather than for a particular performance. By the fourth ceremony, this was changed to the format that we know now.
Gaynor was a major box office draw from the late '20s to the late '30s. She’s listed alongside other Best Actress winners such as Mary Pickford and Marie Dressler as being among the most defining female leads of the era. She successfully survived the rapid transition from silent to sound (something that destroyed many movie stars’ careers), and is probably best known for playing the lead in the original 1937 version of A Star is Born, a role later redone by Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and Lady Gaga in the three remakes. Her career was so lucrative that she retired at 33 (lucky bitch) and focussed more on oil painting and her marriage to an openly gay costume designer called Adrian (Gaynor herself was rumoured to be either gay or bisexual too).
In these three films, she very much displays her niche for the vulnerable, pious, loyal-wife-with-a-strong-heart characters. She has big, mournful eyes and a diminutive figure, making her perfect to display an impoverished but wilful underdog, comparable to Disney’s fragile Snow White. She does do this ever so well, and it’s easy to support her. However, as with all silent movies, it’s hard to judge them by today’s standards. Their structure, story-telling and acting/directing styles are quite alien. 7th Heaven especially suffers from a need for too many dialogue cards to convey what’s going on, and beef up the running time for a frustratingly lightweight plot. Meanwhile Street Angel’s plot resorts to one melodrama after another, because what it lacks in dialogue it has to make up for in action.
Sunrise is by far the most engaging of the three, and I highly recommend it. Ironically, it was the least successful of the three at the time (7th Heaven nabbed more nominations than any other film at the ceremony). But it’s incredibly watchable because thanks to the German Expressionist influences of director F.W. Murnau, who directed the famous Nosferatu, the story is told more abstractly, through action and visuals, and with minimal dialogue cards (which Murnau apparently hated). The story is ridiculous (Gaynor forgives her husband for plotting to murder her far too quickly), but the build-up to the attempted murder has genuine suspense and the climactic storm is gripping. The contrast between the fairytale crookedness of the peasants’ village and the over-sized glitz and glamour of the city is stunning to see, and Gaynor herself gives her strongest example of meekness equating to strength. It is now not only considered one of Gaynor’s defining movies, but also one of Murnau’s, and one of the most important of the silent era.
Gaynor only returned to acting in nondescript and sometimes unsuccessful forms from the late '50s onwards, but her Best Actress win keeps her name hugely important in cinematic history. She lived a long life before dying in 1984 from injuries sustained from a car crash two years beforehand.
Highlight
The “will-he-won’t-he” suspense in the build-up to the attempted murder scene in Sunrise is very Hitchcockian. It may even have influenced the Master of Suspense.
Lowlight
Charles Farrell delivers a lengthy speech about how non-religious he is in 7th Heaven which requires about 8 dialogue cards when it only really needed one. If we can’t hear the dialogue, speeches like this just seem a bit overdone.
Marks
Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans: 9/10
7th Heaven: 4/10
Street Angel: 6/10
7th Heaven: 4/10
Street Angel: 6/10
This is a difficult article because we have to sum up three separate films of which the one connecting factor is Janet Gaynor, all of which are very different and yet in which she plays a similar role each time.
By far and away Sunrise is the best one, and is still considered a high watermark of filmmaking. It matches Hitchockian menace with clear innovation. At one point, the Other Woman describes the city to the Man and visions of what’s available at the city are overlaid on the main film footage, all while the Other Woman is dancing vividly. It’s a metaphorical way of showing how he is being seduced by her grand words, and doesn’t involve a single title card.
In fact the title cards are perhaps the best way to judge these films. Sunrise, full of innovation and power, uses hardly any title cards (apparently the director F.W. Murnau hated them) which means we watch it carefully, piecing it together without dialogue to help us. Gaynor excels in this film, despite a frankly terrible wig, showing a meek and mild doormat-type person gradually gain confidence and strength. Sure it takes her husband trying to kill her to do it, but hey you do you boo.
Both 7th Heaven and Street Angel are more second-rate and feature far more title cards. Street Angel is set in Paris and the script moves frighteningly fast, with her mother dying, being arrested for prostitution, joining a circus and meeting a painter all within 30 minutes. The moment when she decides that the sensible option to raise money is to be a sex-worker is frankly ridiculously overplayed and happens well before she’s considered other options. The film then drags on further with me losing track of what happens quite far in. Ultimately it has a saccharine ending that feels bizarrely tacked on.
7th Heaven is a little better but has a similar vibe, of a downtrodden woman meeting a sewer worker and for various reasons pretending to be married to him and living with him in his small flat on the seventh floor of a Paris building. He then goes off to war and she is pursued by another man when it’s thought her original beau has died. Again, by the end of the film, a saccharine finale feels rather forced, although one can imagine the cinema-goers of the 1920s might have lapped up the endings, much as we love a romantic drama today.
Janet Gaynor throughout is an interesting example of what cinema-goers wanted to see at this period. Always shown as poor and working class, she flees the police in both 7th Heaven and Street Angel but is unjustly accused or oppressed. She has wide eyes and a tiny delicate frame, which each film seeks to highlight. In one moment in 7th Heaven, she is embraced by her husband who physically picks her off the ground and swings her round like a rag doll. Gaynor is clearly at home in the silent movie acting style, with subtler choices than her co-stars which still translate to the screen. In the Hitchcock-style boat scene in Sunrise she shows a growing uncertainness about her husband’s actions with a slick, underplayed style that ultimately makes the scene shimmer with fear and ominousness.
I can’t say I would ever seek out more works by her, but after three silent films on the trot, that may be more a comment on the difference of watching this very different medium. It requires total focus and comes hand in hand with the ‘20s style of storytelling - very melodrama with a required happy ending. But regardless of that, we have our first winner - and with that Janet Gaynor sets off our next project!
Highlight
The innovation and new ideas that are present constantly across Sunrise.
Lowlight
The murky and confusing storytelling that hits 2/3 of the way in, in Street Angel.
Marks
Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans: 9/10
7th Heaven: 5/10
Street Angel: 5/10
7th Heaven: 5/10
Street Angel: 5/10
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