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Well, everybody has the right to hate Valentine's Day, and frankly it is not hard to understand the free-floating bitterness in the air. V-Day is just one of the holidays that have come to symbolize one of our least endearing traits, the distillation of sentiment down to shiny material goods -- what one of my colleagues acerbically called the "commoditization of love." No, Virginia, this is not going to be yet another article on the hollowness of romance today. These are not the brightest of times by any stretch of the imagination, but to willfully concentrate on sourness and ironic detachment is as much of an easy, sentimental attitude as being mindlessly optimistic. And, dare I say, it is much more limiting as well. In other words, I have come to praise romance, not to bury it. And what medium is better suited to express it than the movies? Cinema's extraordinary ability to communicate feelings as well as ideas has always been tailor-made for the strong emotions and sweeping gestures of romance. Why, oh why then is the genre so moribund nowadays? Despite the occasional exception (Before Sunrise, In the Mood for Love, Punch-Drunk Love), romantic movies have given more tinsel than gold lately. Instead of bursts of full-bodied longing, you have fuzzy-edged Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock and Kate Hudson, and their supposedly luminous smiles. The problem is less with the stars than with the way they have been packaged and sold as audience chew toys, stuck as mechanical-doll personalities in gimmicky products. People familiar exclusively with the modern romantic movie would never imagine the genre could soar to the heights of, say, Letter From an Unknown Woman, The Shop Around the Corner, The Lady Eve, Love in the Afternoon or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, just to name a few of its glories. It is symptomatic of today's waning interest in true cinematic romance that one of its pioneers has been virtually forgotten. Frank Borzage (1893-1962) was Hollywood's master of the romantic, and despite passionate support by such critics as Andrew Sarris and Jean-Pierre Coursodon, his name has faded into undeserved obscurity. I have seen only a small fraction of Borzage's eighty-something films, but it has been more than enough to feel this neglect has been absurd. Romance has always been given short drift in favor of lofty subjects and fashionable negativism, and few cinematic oeuvres are more deserving of renewed interest than the Borzagian brand of lyricism. Born of Italian-Swiss heritage, Borzage graduated from prop boy to actor to finally director in the beginning days of American cinema. Though handed a miscellany of projects to work with by studios, he quickly established a recognizable personality. The key to the filmmaker's art is his conception of the spiritual being as powerful as (if not stronger than) the physical. If that implies severity and piety on Borzage's part, his work is far from austere: inordinately warm-blooded, his films abound with boisterous bits of comic business, even in the bleakest of plots. Many of his characters are products of the Depression, street-scarred, trying to simply live in an abandoned tenement or a rickety tugboat. In 7th Heaven (1927), the quintessential Borzage movie, Janet Gaynor is a "Madonna of the pavements," a poor orphan who is about to sink a knife into her heart when she meets sewer worker Charles Farrell. He takes her to his place, a squalid room atop an observatory. The barrenness of their home changes subtly as their love for each other grows, and by the time Farrell is sent off to war their closeness is palpable. Throughout the film, Borzage makes the viewer share the couple's physicality: they hug, kiss, hold each other as wounded creatures rediscovering love after an extended emotional famine. The beauty of the film, and of Borzage's art in general, is that he is able to make "love" not just an abstract term degraded by overuse, but an invisible entity as present as a poltergeist. His characters' emotions are heightened, felt as much as their physical acts; their affection for each other floats in the air around them, reflected by graceful, delicate camera movements. It is this belief in love as a living, engulfing force that enables Borzage to pull off one of the most richly moving climaxes in romantic cinema. Gaynor and Farrell have devised a way to keep in touch while he is in the muddy trenches: they will think of each other every day at the same moment. The two keep this telepathic correspondence until one night Farrell is struck by an enemy soldier and left for dead. Gaynor feels something has happened, but refuses to believe the worst. Without giving away the ending, it is possible to compare its intensity and sheer belief in the power of emotions to Carl Dreyer's Ordet.
Borzage kept working within the Hollywood system for more than 40 years, and left behind a treasury of lyrical works.
The longing couples of A Farewell to Arms, A Man's Castle, History Is Made at Night, Three Comrades and The Mortal
Storm, among many others, give romance a good name. And there is still so much to discover. That these films' loveliness
remains forgotten while today's plastic-flavored confections keep raking in the bucks is infinitely more distressing than
choosing what kind of chocolate your girlfriend wants on Feb. 14.
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