7th Heaven / Street Angel / Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
7th Heaven
Street Angel
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
1927/28 – 7th Heaven / Street Angel / Sunrise
That first Awards ceremony was a strange one. They hadn’t really settled on their format quite yet. The first woman to ever win an Oscar for the Best Actress category was Janet Gaynor, and she was actually nominated for three films. The next year, and every year that followed, they made it for only a single film performance, which I think was all for the better.
Gaynor was only 21-22 years old when filming these three movies, though she had been acting in movies since 1924, mostly in uncredited roles. In 1926, her career began to take off, as she started getting lead roles. She had a delicate beauty that was captivating on the big screen. She had large eyes that had the extraordinary ability to broadcast her emotions, eyes that were able to speak volumes, even when they were closed. Her expressive mouth was lovely, and she had the tiniest cleft in her chin. In short, she was a perfect model of youth and beauty.
In 7th Heaven, she played a waifish girl who lived under the lash of her absinth addicted sister. When her sister tries to murder her in the gutter, Chico, a remarkable fellow, saved her life. He was the only person who showed her kindness. Eventually they fall in love. Gaynor’s performance was good, requiring a wide range of emotions, from fear to destitution, from caution to kindness, and finally from love to ecstasy. Of course, being a silent film required her portrayal of each of these emotions to be a little exaggerated, but to her credit, there was also depth and subtlety to her performance. And she had the face of an angel, fragile and lovely, which didn’t hurt.
But it was Gaynor’s performance in Street Angel that really earned her the honor of Best Actress. Here, she effortlessly gave us, without the use of words, some pretty clear emotional gravitas. She played a woman who committed a petty crime, and ran from the police. Later, after she has found love, she is found by the authorities, taken away. In the most heartbreaking scene in the film, she agrees to turn herself in if the inspector allows her one hour to say goodbye to her lover. She cannot bear to tell him that she will be leaving him at the end of the hour. But when her time is up, she gives him up to serve her sentence, and walks away with bravery and resolve. It was a powerful moment. Gaynor really earned her Oscar in this film, though the statuettes weren’t called Oscars then.
And finally, in Sunrise, she played the part of a wife whose husband nearly murders her at the suggestion of his wicked mistress. For the first half of the film, she had little to do except weep because her husband nearly killed her in cold blood. In the second half, he gets her to forgive him, and she portrays happiness. There was very little else to the role. But Gaynor played those two basic emotions easily enough. There was a brief scene in which she did a bit of peasant dancing, and a surprise hurricane for the climax where she nearly drowns in a lake. But honestly, this role didn’t impress me as much as the others. I think her acting still retained too much of the waif, and not enough of the wife and mother.
In doing a little reading, I discovered that Sunrise was actually the winner of a unique category that was discontinued after the first Academy Awards ceremony: Best Unique and Artistic Picture. In other words, it would have been a contender for the Outstanding Picture Award, but was not considered because it was in this special category. As a whole, I might agree with its quality in that capacity. It was a good film, full of innovative filmmaking techniques and good story telling. And incidentally, I think the Academy made the right decision when retroactively granting Wings the top honor. It was a better film. But my opinion of Gaynor’s acting in Sunrise remains the same.