Career
Borzage was a successful director throughout the 1920s but reached his peak in the late silent and early sound era. Absorbing visual influences from the German director F.W. Murnau, who was also resident at Fox at this time, he developed his own style of lushly visual romanticism in a hugely successful series of films starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, including Seventh Heaven (1927), for which he won the first Academy Award for Directing, Street Angel (1928) and Lucky Star (1929). (He won a second Oscar for 1931's Bad Girl.)
Borzage's trademark was intense identification with the feelings of young lovers in the face of adversity, love in his films triumphing over such trials as World War I (Seventh Heaven and A Farewell to Arms (1932)), disability (Lucky Star), the Depression Man's Castle (1933), a thinly disguised version of the Titanic disaster in History Is Made at Night (1937), and the rise of Nazism, a theme which Borzage had virtually to himself among Hollywood filmmakers from Little Man, What Now? (1933) to Three Comrades (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1940).
His work after 1940 took a turn into religiosity in such films as Strange Cargo (1940) and The Big Fisherman (1959). However his once extremely high reputation fell as his earlier films became hard to see; of his later work only the film noir Moonrise (1948) has enjoyed much critical acclaim. After 1948, his output was sporadic. He was the original director of L'Atlantide (Journey Beneath The Desert, 1961), but was too sick to continue, and Edgar G. Ulmer took over. Borzage was uncredited for the sequences he did direct.
In 1955 and 1957, Borzage was awarded The George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film.
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