Notes on "Lazybones (1925)" and "Liliom (1930)"
30 June 2018 (around 9:30pm)
Both films are very clearly the work of Frank Borzage, and this is to thank for the majority of the most interesting––if not necessarily pleasant––aspects of the works. Lazybones is an assured, leisurely melodrama in the loosest sense of the word. It is naturalistic in its depictions of neighborhoods, fishing, the routines and mundanities of early 20th century life. Buck Jones convincingly grows up, and convincingly makes the rather pedophilic-incesty overtones of the central romance easier to swallow. Some absolutely striking shots, such as the daughter running through the street, sunlight glowing all around her. For all its romance and idealism, it ends on a surprisingly quiet moment of naturalism as Lazybones leaps into the river to try and catch a fish, not unlike the event that sets the plot in action, thus suggesting a mildness that Lazybones will live in, rather than the violence of the war, or the unsatisfiable romance with his adopted daughter (?). This same vision of fathers-and-daughters repeats in Liliom at the end, when Liliom meets his daughter. He slaps her, taken back, and yet in the notion of the slap as a kiss, something that both the daughter and Julia have felt, there's a pairing of them together that, along with Liliom's aggressive courting of his daughter to talk to him, makes the entire scene read "in bad taste"––and indeed the only way to take Borzage's art is to watch it with the idealistic romantic eyes that he almost certainly had. Like the blind lover at the end of Seventh Heaven, in Borzage's art, to see is not to see. Thankfully, the film is extraordinarily beautiful, especially the introduction to the carnival, with its roaming tracking shot as Julia and her friend go in, and the dynamism of the camera on the carousel. Perhaps most transcendently of all––one of the great images in all of Borzage and all of early sound cinema––is the train coming through the window, winding around Julia and Liliom–––shocking and awe-inspiring.
Both films are very clearly the work of Frank Borzage, and this is to thank for the majority of the most interesting––if not necessarily pleasant––aspects of the works. Lazybones is an assured, leisurely melodrama in the loosest sense of the word. It is naturalistic in its depictions of neighborhoods, fishing, the routines and mundanities of early 20th century life. Buck Jones convincingly grows up, and convincingly makes the rather pedophilic-incesty overtones of the central romance easier to swallow. Some absolutely striking shots, such as the daughter running through the street, sunlight glowing all around her. For all its romance and idealism, it ends on a surprisingly quiet moment of naturalism as Lazybones leaps into the river to try and catch a fish, not unlike the event that sets the plot in action, thus suggesting a mildness that Lazybones will live in, rather than the violence of the war, or the unsatisfiable romance with his adopted daughter (?). This same vision of fathers-and-daughters repeats in Liliom at the end, when Liliom meets his daughter. He slaps her, taken back, and yet in the notion of the slap as a kiss, something that both the daughter and Julia have felt, there's a pairing of them together that, along with Liliom's aggressive courting of his daughter to talk to him, makes the entire scene read "in bad taste"––and indeed the only way to take Borzage's art is to watch it with the idealistic romantic eyes that he almost certainly had. Like the blind lover at the end of Seventh Heaven, in Borzage's art, to see is not to see. Thankfully, the film is extraordinarily beautiful, especially the introduction to the carnival, with its roaming tracking shot as Julia and her friend go in, and the dynamism of the camera on the carousel. Perhaps most transcendently of all––one of the great images in all of Borzage and all of early sound cinema––is the train coming through the window, winding around Julia and Liliom–––shocking and awe-inspiring.
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