Career
Borzage was a successful director throughout the 1920s but reached his peak in the late silent and early sound era. Absorbing visual influences from the German director F.W. Murnau, who was also resident at Fox at this time, he developed his own style of lushly visual romanticism in a hugely successful series of films starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, including Seventh Heaven (1927), for which he won the first Academy Award for Directing, Street Angel (1928) and Lucky Star (1929). (He won a second Oscar for 1931's Bad Girl.)
Borzage's trademark was intense identification with the feelings of young lovers in the face of adversity, love in his films triumphing over such trials as World War I (Seventh Heaven and A Farewell to Arms (1932)), disability (Lucky Star), the Depression Man's Castle (1933), a thinly disguised version of the Titanic disaster in History Is Made at Night (1937), and the rise of Nazism, a theme which Borzage had virtually to himself among Hollywood filmmakers from Little Man, What Now? (1933) to Three Comrades (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1940).
His work after 1940 took a turn into religiosity in such films as Strange Cargo (1940) and The Big Fisherman (1959). However his once extremely high reputation fell as his earlier films became hard to see; of his later work only the film noir Moonrise (1948) has enjoyed much critical acclaim. After 1948, his output was sporadic. He was the original director of L'Atlantide (Journey Beneath The Desert, 1961), but was too sick to continue, and Edgar G. Ulmer took over. Borzage was uncredited for the sequences he did direct.
In 1955 and 1957, Borzage was awarded The George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film.
Read more about this topic: Frank Borzage
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)
“My ambition in life: to become successful enough to resume my career as a neurasthenic.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)