Follow us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter Watch us on Youtube Join the Archive Mailing List Read our Blog

2 x Borzage

History Is Made at Night (1937)
February 14, 2013 - 7:30 pm

“In Borzage, there is no higher purpose than love—nothing exists beyond love, everything else is ephemeral.”—Kent Jones, Film Comment.

Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by the American Film Institute/National Endowment for the Arts Preservation Grants program.

History is Made at Night (1937)

A swooning mash-up of comedy, melodrama, farce and tragedy, History is Made At Night defies narrative logic in favor of love’s more unpredictable ways.  After an unhappily married American woman (Jean Arthur) meets a debonair Parisian maitre d’ (Charles Boyer), not her murderously jealous husband, a bad bouillabaisse, or an iceberg in the Atlantic, could keep them apart.

Production: Walter Wanger Productions, Inc.  Distribution: United Artists Corp.  Producer: Frank Borzage.  Director: Frank Borzage.  Screenwriter: Gene Towne, Graham Baker.  Cinematographer: Gregg Toland.  Art Director: Alexander Toluboff.  Editor: Margaret Clancey.  Music: Alfred Newman.  With: Charles Boyer, Jean Arthur, Leo Carrillo, Colin Clive, Ivan Lebedeff.  35mm, b/w, 97 min.

Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by the AFI/NEA Preservation Grants Program, in cooperation with the Samuel Goldwyn Company.

Secrets (1933)

Production: The Pickford Corp.  A Frank Borzage Production.  Distribution: United Artists Corp.  Producer: Frank Borzage.  Director: Frank Borzage.  Based on the play Secrets by Rudolf Besier and May Edginton.  Screenwriter: Frances Marion.  Cinematographer: Ray June.  Art Direction: Richard Day.  Editor: Hugh Bennett.  Music: Alfred Newman.  With: Mary Pickford, Leslie Howard, C. Aubrey Smith, Blanche Friderici, Doris Lloyd.

In her final screen appearance Mary Pickford plays the daughter of a 19th century New England shipping magnate whisked away to California by Leslie Howard’s office clerk.  From a fairytale opening to the brutalism of the frontier, director Frank Borzage strikes a number of registers in returning to Besier and Eddington’s play to chart love’s perseverance from first bloom to old age.

35mm, b/w, 90 min.