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Film angel

THE SHAMROCK HANDICAP: Gaynor is very photogenic but doesn’t get much to do here.

Neither The Johnstown Flood, a melodrama so clunky it almost descends into farce, nor The Shamrock Handicap, a slice of horse-race blarney from John Ford, gives much of an indication of what Borzage and Murnau might have seen in Gaynor. Diminutive, with a sweet, compact face, she’s very photogenic but she hasn’t much to do in either picture. Fortunately, Borzage, a Salt Lake native who found in the elaborate, stylized Hollywood of the late ’20s the ideal resources for a distinctively 19th-century vision, and Murnau, a German Expressionist who, emigrating to Hollywood at the peak of his career, decided on American actors for his adaptation of his countryman Hermann Sudermann’s novel A Trip to Tilsit, both fastened on Gaynor as the embodiment of their separate versions of romanticism. They located her poignant, waif-like quality, her depth of feeling (at her best, she can stand proudly alongside Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford), and a quite startling expressive range. In Sunrise, she’s the heartbroken country wife whose husband (George O’Brien, who’d played scenes with her in The Johnstown Flood) is in thrall to a vamp from the city (Margaret Livingston); he plots to drown his wife but comes to his senses and then has to win back her trust. As Angela in Street Angel, she’s a desperately poor Neapolitan girl who descends to thievery and solicitation to cadge money for her dying mother’s medicine; caught and sent to prison, she escapes with a traveling circus, becoming independent and free-spirited. Farrell is Gino, the carefree painter who falls in love with her face and joins the circus so he can paint her. In Lucky Star he’s a soldier crippled in the First World War and she’s a farm girl, brought up by a strict, unhappy mother (Hedwiga Reicher) to be neither honest nor clean, whom he mentors and transforms. (I wasn’t able to see Seventh Heaven.)