And who among us doesn’t love squirrelly old romantic melodramas altogether? he asked tentatively, well knowing that in fact many people do not love them, that many people find this kind of overdetermined, overworked combination of unlikely stories and garish emotional displays to be exactly the proof that old movies from 70 years ago are […]

The five films that Frank Borzage directed after 1925’s Lazybones are either lost or otherwise unavailable, meaning that the modern viewer loses a bit of context for the jump from that film to 7th Heaven in 1927; and what a hell of a jump it was. Lazybones, which you may recall as the established director’s […]

The first film Frank Borzage made for William Fox, more than ten years into a career that would ultimately brush against the half-century mark, was Lazybones, adapted from a moderately successful novel and subsequent stageplay. It’s the story of Steve Tuttle (Buck Jones), the local layabout in a small American town. A man who’d rather […]