The English Teacher's Top Ten: The Films of Frank Borzage

Our maverick English Teacher and movie buff goes the "Top Ten "route with movie makers, movie stars, and movie genres. Up next - Frank Borzage. Unjustly neglected today, Borzage was a major filmmaker of the Silent period who made the transition to sound, weathered the transition from pre-code to code in the 1930s, and worked through depression era, WWII, and post -War Hollywood. Unabashedly romantic with a taste for melodrama, Borzage seems old-fashioned today, but beneath that surface lies a remarkable emotional resonance and a central core of humanism that gives his best work a powerful gravitas. The first Oscar winning director ( he won 2 in Oscar's first five years), Borzage made films attacking fascism and Nazism when that was a dangerous thing to do. His Film "The Mortal Storm" so enraged Hitler that Der Führer banned Hollywood pictures from being shown in Germany, even though the US had not yet entered WWII.