LUCKY STAR (FOR SALE/DVD) Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell Lost Film 1929 !

Lucky Star

Directed by Frank Borzage
US 1929, 35mm, silent, b/w, 99 min.
With Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, Guinn “Big Boy” Williams
Live Piano Accompaniment

Gaynor’s last collaboration with Borzage finds her once again playing opposite Charles Farrell in a melancholy melodrama about an embattled couple whose love for each other overcomes all odds. Set largely in a rural Midwestern village, Lucky Star features Gaynor as an impoverished, willful young woman enamored of Farrell’s wheelchair-bound WWI veteran. The misty, fairy-tale-like milieu, fabricated entirely inside the studio, is bathed in Borzage’s trademark chiaroscuro lighting and soft-focus camera style. Originally released with short sequences of spoken dialogue and sound effects, Lucky Star was technically a hybrid work, a picture poised on the transition point between the mature silent cinema and the nascent talkie boom. With no known prints in existence, the film was long considered “lost” to history until an intact nitrate copy (minus any sound elements) was recently rediscovered and partially restored by the Nederlands Filmmuseum. And here it is.