Frank Borzage’s silent romance about a Paris sewer worker and the beaten girl he takes in is every bit as sentimental as its reputation, and it earns nearly all of it. Janet Gaynor is the reason; Charles Farrell shouts a little.
Chico (Charles Farrell) works in the sewers of Paris and believes he deserves better. He wants to be a street washer, above ground in the light, and he has told God so more than once, in the tone of a man complaining to a landlord. Diane (Janet Gaynor) lives a few streets away with her sister Nana (Gladys Brockwell), who drinks and beats her. Frank Borzage’s silent film, from a screenplay by Benjamin Glazer based on Austin Strong’s stage play, brings the two together by accident, keeps them together with a lie told to a policeman, and spends most of its 119 minutes finding out whether the lie can be made true.
It is as sentimental as anyone has warned you. We recommend it warmly anyway, because Borzage does not apologise for the feeling and does not fake it. The film believes two poor people in an attic can be happy, and it does the work to make us believe it too: a bed, a table, a skylight, a neighbour who lends a plate. Most critics rate it highly and on this occasion we are with them.
The idea everyone remembers is the staircase. Chico’s room is on the seventh floor, and the first time he takes Diane up, the camera goes with them, rising straight through the stairwell in one continuous movement while the pair come round each landing below it. Ernest Palmer and Joseph A. Valentine shot the film, and this is their best passage: it tells you what the title means before a title card has to. When the camera stops, the room is small and the rooftops fill the window.
Gaynor is what holds the rest together. She plays Diane at first as somebody trying not to be seen, shoulders in, eyes down, flinching before anyone has moved. The moment that got us comes early, when Chico, out of nothing more than irritation, tells the police she is his wife. Gaynor does not smile. She looks frightened, because kindness has not happened to her before and she does not know its rules. It moved us more than we expected from a scene we knew was coming. Kathleen Kay and Bert Offord dress her in rags for the first stretch and then in one plain dress, and the change in how she stands does most of the talking.
Farrell is the reservation. Chico announces, more than once, that he is a very remarkable fellow, and Farrell plays him to match: chest out, chin up, arms going. It took us a good half hour to accept this as a choice rather than a limit, and we are still not sure it is entirely one. He is better when he is quiet, and Borzage gives him more quiet as the film goes on. Around the pair, Albert Gran’s Boul, a taxi driver who loves his cab like a horse, and David Butler and Marie Mosquini as the Gobins next door give the building a life of its own. Émile Chautard’s Father Chevillon gets Chico his job with the sort of patience the film thinks God ought to show.
In its second half the story goes to war, and we will say little about how. Borzage stages the fighting on a bigger scale than the story strictly needs, and the taxis earn their place. The editors, Barney Wolf, Katherine Hilliker and H.H. Caldwell, cut between the front and the attic so that the two places seem to be at the same hour, which is the point. The title cards, on which Hilliker and Caldwell also share writing credit, are spare and mostly get out of the way. Ben Bard’s Colonel Brissac is a stock villain with a moustache, and the middle stretch sags a little while he circles.
Borzage made more films with Gaynor and Farrell after this one. This is the one to start with, and it is the one where the attic feels most like a real place. Watch it with a live score if you can find a screening that has one, and do not be embarrassed by what it does to you. Borzage is not.
