Lucky Star (1929) - film review

When she sees a team of electrical line repairmen at work, Mary Tucker, the eldest of widow Tucker’s bedraggled offspring, brings them some watered down milk.  The lazy supervisor Wrenn is not impressed when Mary tries to swindle him and provokes a fight with one of his men, the good natured Tim Osborne.  Brought to his senses, Tim beats Mary and chases her away.  Hearing that war has been declared in Europe, Tim and Wrenn both enlist and soon find themselves in soldiers’ uniforms in France.  Whilst delivering supplies, Tim is hit by a barrage of shellfire and is badly wounded.  A year later, Mary is passing Tim’s house and sees her past tormenter through a window, which she proceeds to smash with a stone.   Rather than showing anger, Tim invites her into his house.  Mary is shocked when she sees that the young man is wheelchair bound, having lost the use of both his legs.  Tim occupies himself by repairing things, which he does with great skill, but he finds it hard to cope with his enforced solitude.  Mary promises to visit him every day and soon the two have become the closest of friends.  Mary’s mother is far from pleased by this development.  To her way of thinking, no good can come of her daughter spending so much time with a cripple.  When Wrenn begins to make overtures of marriage to Mary, her mother sees a far more suitable son-in-law.  Oblivious to Wrenn’s reputation as a liar and serial philanderer, Widow Tucker gives her blessing when he offers to marry her daughter...

Lucky Star was the last of four great silent films that Frank Borzage made at Fox studios.  It was also his third and final collaboration with the winning duo Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, following their successful pairing in 7th Heaven (1927) and Street Angel (1928). The film tells a similar tale in which romantic love achieves a miraculous transformation of both body and soul.  Borzage is renowned for his use of full-blooded sentimentality for dramatic purposes, but whereas many of his films merely tug at the heart strings, a few, most notably Lucky Star, punch their way into your chest cavity and rip out your entire cardiovascular apparatus.  If this film does not reduce you to a weeping lump of blancmange you must have an interior made entirely of granite.

Lucky Star is unquestionably one of the greatest of Borzage’s silent films.  It has both the visual majesty and emotional power of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) (a film which many regard as the apotheosis of American silent cinema) yet it is a modest film, focussed almost exclusively on the relationship that develops between the two central protagonists.  It is the narrow scope and intimacy of this film that allow Borzage to use his idea of romanticism to devastating effect, achieving a work of extraordinary sincerity, poignancy and lyrical charm.

Naturally, the more cynical, silicon-based spectators will jib at the film’s turbo-charged sentimentality, its contrived plot and scarcely credible denouement, but it must be appreciated that Borzage is not attempting to make a piece of social realist drama.  His film is far more in the spirit of a fairytale for grown-ups, a visual poem that expresses human feeling and desire in a stylised, not realistic, manner.  Borzage’s dream-like stylisation transports us into a fantasy world in which the power and beauty of love are revealed to us, in much the same way that the great artists of the Middle Ages sought to convey the luminosity of the Christian faith through their paintings.

Yet, for all its contrivance, there is a realism to this film, an emotional realism that comes from the believability of the two main characters, played to tear-jerking perfection by Charles Farrell and Janet Gaynor.  Who can fail to be enchanted by the sublime tenderness of the sequence in which Tim washes Mary’s hair in egg yolk (with the help of an improvised pully system)?.  Who cannot be moved to tears by Tim’s desperate attempts to overcome his disability to secure the woman he loves?  Lucky Star is arguably the most fantastic of Borzage’s films, yet it has an authenticity that transcends its artifice.  Here is a wondrous, life-affirming piece of cinema art that champions both the resilience of the human spirit and the power of love to achieve a change for the better.

We are fortunate that are able to see this film today.  Until very recently, Lucky Star was lost, one of the many missing masterpieces of the silent era.  In a miraculous twist, worthy of Borzage himself, a print of the film was found in 1990, in the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, complete with its Dutch intertitles.  (By contrast, the partial sound version of the film, for which additional scenes were shot to accommodate some sparse dialogue, has yet to resurface).  Recently restored to almost pristine condition, this Borzage classic is now widely acknowledged as one of the true greats of American cinema.

© James Travers 2010

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?