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People are voting emotionally.

Great Film overall

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Lucky Star (1929)*** (out of 4)Entertaining silent drama has Timothy (Charles Farrell) and poor farm girl Mary (Janet Gaynor) meeting under bad circumstances before the start of WWI. After the war Timothy returns home as a cripple and soon he and Mary strike up a strong friendship, which doesn't sit too well with people in town or Mary's mother due to their prejudice against him being cripple. LUCKY STAR should have been a complete disaster but director Frank Borzage and the two stars do a remarkable job at building up the drama and there's no question that the message really packs a punch. The film is incredibly dark and this is especially true when it comes to the message of how people were pretty much throwing cripples into a lonely shack and forgetting about them. The message of this not being right is certainly well told here and especially because there's no melodrama preaching but instead it's perfectly built into the story. I was really surprised to see how dark this part of the story was told and it's pretty darn grim. Some of the best moments in the film deal with the blossoming relationship between the two stars. They made several films together and it's easy to see why because their chemistry just jumps right off the screen. The romance here is quite good and manages to keep a smile on your face throughout. Gaynor, as you'd expect, has no trouble playing the charming farm girl and Farrell is just as great and especially during his more dramatic scenes dealing with not being able to walk. Guinn 'Big Boy' Williams is excellent as the rival for Gaynor's attention and Hedwiga Reicher makes for a great villain as her mother. The ending is incredibly far-fetched but it's so perfectly executed that you can't help but get caught up in the drama.

This is not an all-time great film, but it is surely washable. One thing that amazed me was Janet Gaynor's performance. Two years earlier, she played a rather haggard-looking wife in Sunrise (1927) and yet she plays a very believable child in this movie. Then there's Charles Farrell. In every other film I'd ever seen him in, he looked like he'd been beaten up a short time earlier, but in this one, he looks quite a bit cleaner. Speaking of Sunrise (1927), this film's atmosphere very much reminded me of it. It had that dark surrealistic type of setting. It was the same company (Fox), but different director (Frank Borzage as opposed to F.W. Murnau). It was also neat to see Paul Fix in an early role. I've seen nearly every episode of The Rifleman, where he played Micah, the Marhsall, but here he is many years earlier. He looks quite a bit different, too. Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, he did fine. His character was supposed to be a jerk and he does a good job on it, too. The reason I don't rate this film higher is because of his character, particularly when he's a boss over Charles Farrell. Like I say this film is watchable, but the ending made me go "huh?" For much of the film, Charles Farrell's character is crippled, but all of a sudden, he isn't anymore! While I do like happy endings, it's bit far-fetched. It sort of reminded me of a 1923 Warners Brothers movie in which a mute actress all of a sudden speaks (so to speak in a silent film), but the sudden change was handled better in that film than this one. While not great, I do say it is worth a look.

*SPOILERS FOR VARIOUS BORZAGE FILMS, INCLUDING THIS ONE*"Last night I dreamt that somebody loved me," Morrissey once moaned. "No hope, no harm, just another false alarm." There's surely no-one living who hasn't, before ultimately finding some excellent brunette who also likes Melvyn Douglas, woken up with a hollowness in their middle, wishing those heady, involuntary ramblings of the previous hours were real. It's only Frank Borzage, though, who ever came close to capturing the gentle, lazy, in-sync rhythms of a romantic dream*. Yes, his silent dramas feature mad dashes to the finish, with near-biblical love-fuelled miracles that restore mobility, faith and even life itself, but it's the tender mid-sections that are often the most remarkable (Street Angel is the glorious exception), rich in exploration and that most underrated of emotions - fondness - as the characters quietly circle one another in a dance of romance. Love stories in Borzage films honour honesty, patience and selflessness, while celebrating quirks of human behaviour rarely lauded on screen: naivety, innocence and loyalty beyond measure. While the forces manipulating his characters can seem clunky or excessively melodramatic - if in doubt, he tends to just send Charlie Farrell to war in France - the central duo, and the love between them, always ring utterly true. In their purest, sweetest incarnations these characters are played by Janet Gaynor and Farrell. While he was more of a star than an actor, she was unquestionably and invigoratingly both. I'm not sure I've ever seen an actress with such a startling, natural precision of emotion.The pair's warm, wonderful chemistry dominates Lucky Star, a pastoral film that sees his straightforward wire-fixer and her amoral farm girl initially at loggerheads, only for the war to intervene (quelle surprise). Brilliantly, they truly connect after she takes some belated revenge on him for a spanking by chucking a brick through his window. Two years later. The film's set-up is amusing and the economical war scenes are nicely done (though the trick of intercutting between villain Guinn Williams grinning his head off and Farrell getting blown up is a little heavyhanded), but it's with the budding of romance that the film truly blossoms. The scenes in which Farrell "makes over" Gaynor - both inside and out, washing her hair and admonishing her for telling whoppers - are subtle, beautifully-conceived and wonderfully played. My favourite moment is when Gaynor drops the needle on her new music player, turning with a blissful expression to Farrell's lonely paraplegic, who's cooped up in his house and watching through that broken window. If Liliom (see below) seems to prove right every misconception about talkies (the utter nonsense you hear about stilted dialogue and bad acting does apply to a lot of sound films made before 1931), then the curiously-titled Lucky Star makes those who ignorantly seek to lampoon silent film look utterly ridiculous. The acting is naturalistic, the pace perfect and the baddie just a big guy trying to get his end away. He may be horrible, but he's no moustache-twiddling caricature.In 7th Heaven, Borzage contrasted the dankness of an inner-city squat with the transcendence of the action within. Here, he makes the countryside a character: the pain of rural poverty drives the latter stages of the story, just as the airy idyll of the house and the trickling stream beyond piles atmosphere upon atmosphere in the film's immersive second act. Always one to place climactic obstacles in the way of his characters (an endless stream of people going in the opposite direction, redundancy, an iceberg), his final trick is to lob a snow blizzard at them; even the weather conspiring against these true lovers. But through it all their affecting romance never falters in tone or integrity. This, Gaynor and Farrell's last silent film together (they'd go on to make nine talkies, mostly musical-comedies), is one of the sweetest and most touching films I've seen. He equips himself notably well in a tough part - the scenes of his stricken soldier fighting to walk seem unusually realistic; well, apart from at the end - she's simply mesmerising, and together they're just a dream. Someone should tell Morrissey.PS: "I thought I was making you over and... you've made me over. Good as new." Sob.

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