Lucky Star

"Lucky Star" boasts an exceptional performance by Charles Farrell as the handicapped Tim, who falls in love with a pathetic waif, "Baa-Baa", played by the sweet and petite Janet Gaynor. Whereas in "7th Heaven", Janet Gaynor gives the performance of a lifetime, here in this film it is Charlie Farrell who wows you with his believable, dynamic acting as Tim, a good man maimed in World War One, who comes home in a wheelchair and has to cope with being lame. One can easily see Charles was much more than your typical Hollywood "pretty boy", so it is kind of bizarre that the studios quickly forgot his excellent silent film performances, and put him in vehicles like musicals once sound came in, thereby destroying what should have been a continued dramatic career throughout the coming decades.

Frank Borzage was a sentimental director whose work I have always enjoyed. He continued to make some excellent sound films as the years went on, but his silent films are his most memorable, for he had a knack of drawing excellent and subtle pantomime performances from his actors which communicated emotions far more profoundly without words than with them. I would like to see this film restored and placed on DVD so that future generations can see it. Keeping it locked up - and forcing people to watch poor bootlegs - does not do honor to this film, or to Borzage, Farrell, and Gaynor. They deserve the best showcase for this moving film. I do feel the ending - which I won't reveal - is a cop-out, but other than that "Lucky Star" is a film well worth seeing.

This was my first exposure to Janet Gaynor, and I fell in love with her. She plays a poor, ragamuffin country girl who begins a timid romance with a wheelchair-bound WWI veteran (Charles Farrell), against the stern wishes of her mother, who wants her to marry instead a swaggering bully. Director Frank Borzage keeps the potential mawkish sentimentality at bay, and pulls achingly beautiful and naturalistic performances from his actors. When you watch Gaynor's face in this film, able to convey heaps of emotion (just get a look at her when she first realizes Farrell is confined to a wheelchair) with the most nuanced of glances, it's no surprise that she was able to make a successful transition to sound film and continue as a huge star and box-office draw throughout the 1930s.

The forbidden love storyline is the stuff of standard silent film melodrama, as is the suspenseful race-against-time finale that finds Charles Farrell willing himself to walk so that he can get to Gaynor before her husband-to-be takes her away forever. All of that is as silly as it sounds. But it's the quieter moments that give this film its gentle appeal: like the surprisingly erotic scene in which Farrell decides Gaynor needs a makeover and washes her hair with the yolks of a dozen eggs; or the beautiful bittersweet moment when Farrell gives Gaynor a gold bracelet that looks like an over-sized wedding ring.

A film center in Chicago is showing a festival of Gaynor and/or Borzage films, and I look forward to seeing more of both of them.

Grade: A

Lucky Star is a lovely film. It's good to have a contrast, I ended up watching ten minutes of the Fantastic Four before this film. So after that incredible dross, the Borzage was a double-barrelled blast of wonder to the face. It's a very simple movie story-wise. We start off looking at a farm very early in the morning, still dark, it's awesomely Gothic, probably a set because it's so perfect, but you can't tell. You got these windy lanes and crooked fenceposts and creepy trees. Mary (Janet Gaynor) a dirty and chiselling but winsome little ragamuffin lives on the farm with her Ma and some littl'uns, Pa ain't around. She's milking the cow, probably at five in the morning, when the house is getting up. You can tell that life is pretty hard. It's about 2 minutes of cinema that's more precious than a dozen movies.

Anyway there's these two men Wrenn and Tim. Wrenn is a lazy good-fer-nuthin who is the foreman of the telegraph gang. Tim is the one he always gets to do the hard work. World War One comes and these guys decide to get a load of the world and pack off to France. Anyway we're shown in no uncertain terms during this episode how Tim is a nice guy and Wrenn, well he ain't. Private Tim ends up in a wheelchair when he gets back, on account of Sergeant Wrenn.

Mary is a grown up now, and Tim and Wrenn are vying for her affections. Wrenn has got the head start because he's a blackguard and he's not crippled. So it's a love story. It all seems real simple, but the nuance is what it's all about, the exquisite lighting and camera-work, the great partnership between Gaynor (Mary) and Farrell (Tim), and the heart-rending final scenes. It's simply a charming innocent movie, that there's no way could be made any more.

Tim has to undergo a harrowing struggle in order to get the girl. The snow scenes towards the end have to be seen to be believed.

Another silent movie by Borzage and another winner ,with or without a lucky star!Frank Borzage is the poet of compassion ,of simple happiness, of the bright side of the human soul.Borzage's heroes ("seventh heaven" " street angel" "little man what now?" ) have got to fight against a hostile world .They have to give all they've got: Charles Farrell crawling in the snow would find an exact equivalent in the yet-to-come "the river " when Rosalee warms the lumberjack's naked body with her own body.

Timothy ,confined to a wheelchair ,has everybody against his : the mother who dreams of a rich wedding for her daughter and the buck who seduces all the girls around.Like the other Borzagesque heroes ,he never gives up,ready to sacrifice everything if the girl he loves (Janet Gaynor) finds true happiness.

I wholeheartedly concur with the first reviewer. This is one of the most perfectly crafted of all silent masterpieces, and a further evidence that sound was unnecessary to produce such poignant and moving images. I was amazed how extremely haunting and luminous this movie was. There is no greater degree of luminosity; each scene is a lush, radiant extension of a romantic painting. The brief war scenes alone surpass those in "7th Heaven" and the ethereal romantic moments between Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor match theirs in "Street Angel". I love that scene in which Farrel tells Gaynor why he's on the wheelchair. The photography and story may owe a lot to Murnau's epochal "Sunrise" but most of the material is Borzage's own.

Don't miss it.