by Vanda Krefft
There was no harm, not really, in any of that. It was simply the cost of doing business at a major studio that needed to get its money back. Within the given constraints, Ford added distinctly personal touches. Four Sons pays tribute to Murnau, with whom (despite Sheehan’s attempts to set them at odds with each other) Ford developed a friendship when Murnau was filming Sunrise in late 1926. The Old World scenes of Four Sons were filmed in Germany: foggy battlefield imagery recalls the dark, misty atmosphere when George O’Brien staggers through the swamp in Sunrise, and the portly, uniformed mailman, who controls Mother Bernle’s fate with the letters he delivers, strongly resembles Emil Jannings’s hotel doorman in Murnau’s The Last Laugh.
Four Sons also shows Ford’s sympathy with the heartfelt antiwar sentiments of Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory. For audiences who a decade earlier had been assaulted with images of Germans as bloodthirsty beasts, the first title card of Four Sons made a sharp point: “The Old World—A sleepy contented village, people gentle and kind—” It’s the army officers who bring tragedy to the friendly, peaceful community. Ford vividly signals the coming sorrow. During the first march to war, as German soldiers parade in the background, a cemetery full of white crosses occupies the foreground and middle ground. The closest cross tilts askew. In one of the movie’s most powerful moments, two of the four sons meet on the battlefield: one, fighting with the U.S. Army, finds his German soldier brother dying in an otherwise deserted camp. The American gives his German brother water; they stare at each other in recognition. As the German brother dies, the American clasps him. Then he has to join his fellow soldiers in the march ahead. Reviewers acclaimed Four Sons as “[a]n entirely fresh slant on the World War,” and “the greatest film Ford has ever made.”
Commercially, Four Sons didn’t succeed solely on its own merit. It needed a strong push, which Fox provided. According to Harrison’s Reports, during the first half of its sixteen-week debut run beginning February 13, 1928, at the Gaiety Theatre in New York, Four Sons averaged a respectable $10,000 a week. Receipts then dropped off steadily, and for the last week, ending in early June, they amounted to only $6,000. Reportedly, that number was so low because in order to fill seats and make the movie look big, the studio gave away many free tickets.
Trusting that Four Sons would have greater appeal among the masses, Fox took a big risk by moving it to the 5,920-seat Roxy Theatre on August 11, 1928. His instincts were right. During its first week at the Roxy, Four Sons set an alleged world’s record with earnings of $143,906.75. Subsequent weeks each brought in about $125,000, well above the Roxy’s break-even point of $84,000, and upon wide release, the movie beat house records across the country. In 1929, Photoplay readers chose Four Sons as the best picture of the year.
Ford’s Mother Machree (1928, silent) made an even more intimate appeal to Fox Film’s “mother love” ideal, melding Ford’s experience with Fox’s and, indeed, with that of a great many sons and daughters of lower-class immigrants. Based on the lyrics of a 1910 song and a subsequent short story both by Rida Johnson Young, Mother Machree means “mother my heart.” Ford said, “Mother Machree is the story of all emigrant mothers from all lands in its symbolism.”
Ellen McHugh, whose fisherman husband has died in a storm at sea, leaves her quaint, friendly Irish village in order to give her son, Brian, who is around seven or eight, a better life in America. To pay his fees at an elite private school, she works in a circus sideshow as the “half lady,” using an optical illusion that makes it look as if her body has been amputated from the waist down. When the female school principal discovers Ellen’s occupation, she threatens to expel Brian unless Ellen allows her to adopt him. Heartbroken, Ellen agrees. She then becomes a domestic in a wealthy home where, years later, Brian, now a lawyer, shows up to court the family’s daughter. Although Ellen lingers in the room, he doesn’t recognize her. A true Fox Film mother, she keeps her silence—but in the end they are reunited.
Like Four Sons, for anyone who cared to look deeper, Mother Machree was more than a sob story. The movie sharply criticized the harsh reception that America sometimes gave to vulnerable, well-meaning new arrivals. Although less than thirty minutes of Mother Machree is known to have survived, Ford often made his best points in small moments, and the remaining footage expresses itself clearly. The young widow trying to find work in the United States stands outside an employment agency looking at job listings when a hand hangs up a “No Vacancies” sign, and one sees, from behind, Ellen’s head turn to the side and look down. Her humiliating freak show job makes her look like half a person and forces her to endure the amused derision of strangers. Later, the faded Ellen picks a withered flower out of a bouquet on a table in her employer’s home. Hers have been the sort of sacrifices that sustain the American myths of opportunity and mobility—because of her self-denial, her son can walk into a luxurious home on a social call—yet America has looked through Ellen as if she weren’t there.
Surely those images must have touched Fox. His mother had told him many stories about her vivacious girlhood in Hungary, about the ribbons in her hair and the red boots she wore proudly, yet he had known Anna Fox only as a stooped, careworn woman who would lose seven of her thirteen children to New World ghetto conditions and who would do everything possible to ensure that he ascended far above her. Perhaps the movie could bring belated justice. Fox said he hoped that Mother Machree would stir sympathy for the downtrodden.
As with Four Sons, Fox kept faith with Mother Machree even though it earned only mediocre revenue and mixed reviews during its opening run on Broadway, first at the Globe Theatre and then at the Times Square Theater, in the spring of 1928. Lavishly advertised, Mother Machree redeemed itself when Fox sent it into wide release in the fall of 1928. The movie became one of Fox Film’s highest-earning pictures of the 1928–1929 season.
Ford proved equally skilled with other staple Fox Film story elements. The mean, selfish father showed up in Hangman’s House (1928) as a hanging judge who insists that his daughter marry a dissolute wealthy man she doesn’t love. Upstream (1927) celebrated professional camaraderie and the power of faith: the residents of a theatrical boardinghouse form a sort of family, and one of them, an unsuccessful ham actor, achieves greatness after a producer, believing he is someone else, hires him to play Hamlet on the London stage. By 1929, Ford was widely recognized as an artist who could spin gold out of even the humblest story material.
Of all the creative talent ever assembled at Fox Film, Frank Borzage probably came the closest to being the sort of director Fox would have been had he chosen that career. Fox valued no quality in a movie more than “heart appeal,” and Borzage, in his mid-thirties, the son of Italian immigrants who was born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, established himself on the Fox lot as “the director with a heart.”
Everybody liked Borzage. Colleagues described him as “a big, powerful and gentle man . . . silent and lovable,” “very soft spoken,” and “very sensitive.” To work with, he was practically ideal. Cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg explained, “He had a fine, gentlemanly way of directing . . . never got excited, never bawled anybody out . . . just talked with his actors, discussed the scene, and went to work.”
While John Ford gave Fox the story of his relationship with his mother in Four Sons and Mother Machree, Borzage made three movies reflecting the other great relationship theme of Fox’s personal life: the redemptive power of romantic love. Anna Fox had stood behind her son and pushed him forward; Eva Fox stood beside him and always believed in his greatness. Neither husband nor wife had ever loved anyone else, and in nearly thirty years of marriage, according to Fox, they had never yet had any moment of division. In 7th Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928), and Lucky Star (1929), all three with Janet Gaynor and handsome newcomer Charles Farrell, Borzage pictured the sort of pure, joyful love Fox believed he had in his marriage.
Based on a hit Broadway play, with principal filming started on January 24, 1927, 7th Heaven tells t
he story of Chico (Farrell), a Paris sewer worker skeptical of love and religious faith, and Diane (Gaynor), who has been mercilessly beaten and forced to steal by her absinthe-addicted older sister (Gladys Brockwell), who is evidently a prostitute. To prevent Diane from being arrested, Chico impulsively tells a policeman that she is his wife and brings her to his apartment after the policeman threatens to check up on the story. Innocents at heart, they overcome each other’s defenses and fall in love—“Chico . . . Diane . . . heaven,” he tells her—and then are separated because it’s 1914 and Chico must go off to fight in the war. All seems lost when circumstances indicate that Chico has been killed. Diane falls into despair. Then, miraculously, Chico reappears and declares that it was their mutual faith in a good God, “the Bon Dieu,” that saved him. True to Fox Film tradition, the ending echoes the code of love set forth in Raoul Walsh’s The Regeneration (1915) with its glowing letters, “God is love.”
The film 7th Heaven was so recognizably magnificent that even though it was made after Sunrise, Fox decided to release it first—evidently to build up Janet Gaynor in the hope that audiences would follow her to the other, more difficult movie. That didn’t work. It may even have backfired, alienating viewers from George O’Brien’s troubled husband character, whose inner conflict drives the plot of Sunrise. How could anybody want to kill that poor girl after all she’d been through in 7th Heaven?
Premiering in May 1927 at Los Angeles’ Carthay Circle Theatre, where it would remain for a phenomenal twenty-three weeks, 7th Heaven won uniformly excellent reviews as “a gem of the purest ray serene” and “tender and tragic and wholly appealing.” It went on to earn worldwide gross rentals of $1.8 million.
Borzage’s Street Angel (1928, silent) is essentially the same movie as 7th Heaven—except that it takes place in Naples instead of Paris, except that Gaynor plays a hot-tempered circus performer instead of a forlorn waif and Charles Farrell an artist instead of a sanitation worker, except that poverty instead of war separates the lovers. But it is the same movie. The opening intertitle card says so: “Everywhere . . . in every town, in every street . . . we pass, unknowing, human souls made great by love and adversity.” Some reviewers complained that Street Angel was too much like 7th Heaven: “a carbon copy of its predecessor, a little worn thin” and “at the most only a synthetic jewel.” It’s probably fairer to say that the movie’s main flaw was that it came second, and that had the order of release been reversed, 7th Heaven might have been perceived as the “me, too” movie. Most critics who judged Street Angel on its own merits were captivated. So were audiences. Street Angel opened to near-capacity business at New York’s Globe Theatre in April 1928 and, months later, after moving to the Roxy, earned “sensational” revenue during a four-week run.
Lucky Star (1929, silent) proves itself equal to 7th Heaven and Street Angel. Once again, love and faith miraculously overcome adversity. Confined to a wheelchair as a result of wartime injuries, unable to return to his job as a telephone lineman, Charles Farrell’s Tim Osborne has no romantic prospects and few visitors to the small cabin where he lives alone. Janet Gaynor’s Mary Tucker is unkempt, uncouth, and sneaky, maltreated by her bitter, widowed mother who is trying to run a farm that doesn’t pay. She begins to visit Tim regularly; they fall in love and transform each other. When her mother arranges for the newly attractive Mary to marry an alleged better prospect, Tim quickly learns to walk again, and rushes to rescue her. Implausible? Not for anyone willing to see the metaphorical truth about the healing power of love. And many were willing to see it. There were too few movies being made like this, heartfelt and soaringly hopeful. Just as 7th Heaven and Street Angel had, Lucky Star became a huge popular success.
Although Borzage would make dozens more movies during a career that lasted until 1961, he never again reached the heights he did in the late 1920s working for Fox. In Fox, Borzage had the blessing of an all-powerful boss who saw in him and welcomed from him the best he had to give.
If, as Fox said in 1928, “The world is ready to receive masterpieces of the cinema,” it was also true that it was extremely difficult to make masterpieces. Many Fox movies fell below that standard. Howard Hawks, having started his directing career at Fox Film in 1926, was still learning; none of the six movies he made between 1927 and 1929 was particularly distinguished. Raoul Walsh tended to repeat himself. First, he reworked Carmen (1915) into Loves of Carmen (1927) with a highly mannered Dolores del Rio instead of the instinctive Theda Bara and, worse, Victor McLaglen as Escamillo. One reviewer lamented, “[T]he marine in What Price Glory dressed in Spanish clothes . . . O dear me, no!”
Downstream, Fox Film’s bargain basement remained open for business with titles such as Plastered in Paris (1928), Wolf Fangs (1927), Stage Madness (1927), Not Quite Decent (1929), and Girls Gone Wild (1929), the last one about a wealthy young woman involved with a gangster bootlegger. As cinematographer Charles G. Clarke, who worked on both Four Sons and Plastered in Paris, observed, motion pictures were “a product like shoes or anything else. They make a $10 pair of shoes and they make a $40 pair of shoes. It’s what the customer wants to pay.”
Fortunately for Fox, the first presentation of the Academy Awards took place on May 16, 1929, and honored films released in 1927 and 1928, by far the studio’s two strongest years. It wasn’t much of a ceremony—just a fifteen-minute affair sandwiched into a dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel that was meant primarily to celebrate the second anniversary of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. There was no suspense because all the winners had been announced three months earlier. And there were only twelve categories, with some awards given for achievement in multiple films. Press coverage was scant.
Still, this was history, the first important formal recognition of artistic achievement in motion pictures. Of the twelve inaugural Academy Awards, Fox Film won five:
Best Director, Frank Borzage, for 7th Heaven;
Best Actress, Janet Gaynor, for 7th Heaven, Street Angel, and Sunrise;
Best Writing, Adapted Story, Benjamin Glazer, for 7th Heaven;
Best Cinematography, Charles Rosher and Karl Struss, for Sunrise; and
Unique and Artistic Production to Fox himself for Sunrise.
No other studio did as well. Paramount came in second, winning four awards, while United Artists took two and M-G-M only one. Overall, two movies led the field with three awards apiece: 7th Heaven and Sunrise. Both those movies also had the greatest number of nominations, five and four respectively. It was a phenomenal score card for Fox Film, which a few years before had been widely scorned as a purveyor of cheap hokum.
Fox didn’t attend the Hollywood Roosevelt dinner. He no longer cared for the applause of his peers. He had lived too long without it and had learned to rely instead on faith in himself and on the approval of the ticket-buying public. To collect his “Unique and Artistic Production” award for Sunrise—arguably the most prestigious one of the group because the “Outstanding Picture” award, given to Paramount’s Wings, had been decided solely on the basis of box-office returns—Fox sent Sheehan. If they hadn’t wanted him as part of their community before, he wasn’t going to come running now just because they had changed their minds.
Although the transition to sound during the latter half of 1928 incited “an almost hysterical state” across most of the motion picture industry, it caused no great distress at Fox Film. With Movietone City and its eight state-of-the-art sound stages in full operation as of late October 1928, the studio began turning out talking pictures that mainly showcased Movietone’s capabilities. In Fox’s first talking feature, Mother Knows Best, Madge Bellamy sang and did an impression of Al Jolson. After In Old Arizona catalogued the sounds of wide-open spaces, Speakeasy (1929) recorded the bustle and snap of New York City life with scenes of a boxing ring, a racetrack, night clubs, the subway, and Grand Central Terminal. The courtroom drama Thru Different Eyes layered the sounds of tapping typewriters and telegraph keys, reporters phoning in the
ir stories, and pedestrians clattering over an iron sidewalk grille just outside the building. The William Fox Movietone Follies of 1929 presented a Ziegfeld Follies type of musical revue.
One movie had higher ambitions. The most socially significant of the early Fox talking pictures, reflecting Fox’s foundational belief that film could instigate broad change, Hearts in Dixie was the first all-black feature film made by a major studio. With only one white cast member in a secondary role, it was nonetheless aimed at the primarily white mainstream audience.
The issue of race in America had continued to trouble Fox ever since The Nigger (1915) provoked an angry response from the African American community. On-screen, Fox had retreated into conventional attitudes, which were on display as late as 1928, when Howard Hawks’s Fazil, about a doomed romance between an Arab prince and a French woman, came across mainly as “a cold and almost scientific exposition of the thesis that an Occidental girl should not marry an Oriental man.” Still, in the mid-1920s, encouraged by his companies’ renewed prosperity, Fox had pushed forward with his ideals in other ways. For the November 1926 premiere of What Price Glory at Broadway’s Sam H. Harris Theatre, the studio made a special citywide effort to recruit African American women to work as usherettes. When Fox’s lease at the Harris ended, he rented the Times Square Theater and transferred the women there. On the West Coast, Fox Film had become known as an unusually good place for African American actors to find work as extras, the only sort of on-camera employment they were likely to find at any major studio.
With the arrival of sound, Fox understood that the door could open wider for minorities. Silent film had inclined audiences to perceive characters almost entirely visually and to attend sharply to differences in skin shades and facial features. Talking pictures added the humanizing dimension of speech and literally gave characters their own voices.