Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
Street Angel
A Neapolitan girl on the run from the police joins a travelling circus and lets a painter make her into a Madonna.
Borzage and his two stars came straight from Seventh Heaven and made it again, darker, in a Naples built on the Fox lot and drowned in fog. Janet Gaynor won the first Academy Award for actress for this, Sunrise and Seventh Heaven together, and this is the one where she has the most to hide: Angela steals to buy her mother medicine, runs, and is happy for exactly as long as Gino does not know. Charles Farrell paints her as a saint while she waits for the police to knock. The score is the Movietone track Fox released it with. Watch the harbour: Ernest Palmer lights it as if the mist were the only real thing in Naples.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Frank Borzage
- Photographed by
- Ernest Palmer
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Janet Gaynor at Fox in consecutive seasons; the first Academy Award for actress was given for both, and for Seventh Heaven besides. Murnau gives her a city to be lost in; Borzage gives her a fog to hide in.