Lucky Star (1929)

• Year: 1929
• Released: 18 Aug 1929
• Country: United States
• Adwords: N/A
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0020122/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lucky_star
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: English
• MPA Rating: N/A
• Genre: Drama, Romance
• Runtime: 100 min
• Writer: John Hunter Booth, H.H. Caldwell, Katherine Hilliker
• Director: Frank Borzage
• Cast: Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, Guinn ‘Big Boy’ Williams
• Keywords: pre-code,

7.7/10

Lucky Star Storyline

Mary, a poor farm girl, meets Tim just as word comes that war has been declared. Tim enlists in the army and goes to the battlefields of Europe, where he is wounded and loses the use of his legs. Home again, Tim is visited by Mary, and they are powerfully attracted to each other; but his physical handicap prevents him from declaring his love for her. Deeper complications set in when Martin, Tim’s former sergeant and a bully, takes a shine to Mary.—Dan Navarro

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Lucky Star Movie Reviews

A Beautiful, Bittersweet Silent

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

Charles Farrell: A Revelation

I have said here and elsewhere that in their collaborations it was Gaynor who carried Farrell, a competent actor who would have had a decent career based on his looks and talent rather than genius: think Richard Arlen. It was the teaming with Gaynor that made him, for a while anyway, a star.

Or so I thought until I saw this movie. In this one, sitting in a wheelchair, scrubbing Gaynor’s hair (“Why, Baa-baa! You’re a blond!”), and later, Gaynor lets him carry the scenes, and he does it: aggressive, funny, dynamic, angry and thunderstruck.

There are the usual Borzage touches, including the surrealistic farmhouse — attributed to the Murnau influence, but really, Borzage was going that way already. It had everything to do with his mysticism, I think. His impressionistic sets helped create a private world where miracles could happen. Or maybe make it apparent.

Crawling in the snow

Another silent movie by Borzage and another winner ,with or without a lucky star!Frank Borzage is the poet of compassion ,of simple happiness, of the bright side of the human soul.Borzage’s heroes (“seventh heaven” ” street angel” “little man what now?” ) have got to fight against a hostile world .They have to give all they’ve got: Charles Farrell crawling in the snow would find an exact equivalent in the yet-to-come “the river ” when Rosalee warms the lumberjack’s naked body with her own body.

Timothy ,confined to a wheelchair ,has everybody against his : the mother who dreams of a rich wedding for her daughter and the buck who seduces all the girls around.Like the other Borzagesque heroes ,he never gives up,ready to sacrifice everything if the girl he loves (Janet Gaynor) finds true happiness.