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Redemption by Danny Dufour5/13/2023 Summing up this view, Jones described Borzage as “a Hollywood melodramatist with absolutely no interest in the workings of everyday life-the world around Borzage’s lovers and believers is a procession of interchangeable amorphous abstractions.” The director, he added, can offer us “precious little in the way of irony, no cynicism to speak of, never made a film noir.”īut, Jones continued, Borzage “had something rare in Hollywood: a philosophical formulation of life.” By contrast with the characters in films by Hitchcock, who are generally looking at something real, or John Ford’s, who look into the past, Jones observed, “When a character looks in a film by Borzage, it’s usually a matter of looking through objective reality into an ultimate reality of celestial harmony. At the time of Jones’s article, Borzage, once celebrated as one of Hollywood’s leading directors, had languished in obscurity for the best part of four decades, largely written off-when he was noticed at all-as a director of hopelessly dated, ultraromantic melodramas. “Why should we bother with Frank Borzage?” asked Kent Jones, launching into a detailed consideration of the director’s work in Film Comment in 1997.
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