I am glad to read that Frank Borzage has gotten a retrospective series just finishing up at MOMA and I have to disagree with Richard Brody about one of its movies:
Such happy endings as Borzage grants his lovers are often bitterly ironic ones—tacked-on sequences that implausibly bring characters back from certain death. The end of "Living on Velvet" is so unreal as to seem posthumous; "History Is Made at Night" is a transatlantic romance that essentially gives the wreck of the Titanic a happy ending. "Moonrise" (1948), a violence-riddled romantic noir also playing at MOMA, adds to an implausibly miraculous survival a legalistic ending that, in the manner of "Crime and Punishment," will separate its young lovers for years.
I have never seen Living on Velvet (1935). Personally speaking, the ending of History Is Made at Night (1937) has never bothered me because the film has burned through so many conventionally incompatible genres by the time it runs into an iceberg that a last-minute eucatastrophe is no more jarring than Señor Wences playing one of Charles Boyer's hands. But aside from the fact that I find the ending of Moonrise neither implausible nor ironically legalistic, it cannot be fairly described as tacked on because it was neither invented by the director nor imposed by the studio: like the startling majority of this humane and delicate murder ballad of a film, it came directly from the 1946 source novel by Theodore Strauss.
It was not as visible to me when I discovered the film in 2016, but having read the novel for the first time earlier this month and introduced![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch to the movie last week, the point of the story is the possibility of breaking cycles of violence. Everything right up to the last chapter feels like an inescapable trajectory of doom because the protagonist can't see anything else from the moment he stumbles out of an unequal fight turned manslaughter in awful echo of his father's crime for which he has been bullied and ostracized literally from the cradle, but if the reader-viewer can hold themselves just enough apart from his despairing tunnel vision, we can see sooner than he can the alternate paths he's being offered if he can take the risk of reaching for them instead of driving himself on to destruction through the well-worn channels of his fatalism and self-loathing, his sense of isolation which is simultaneously as real and cruel as a jerkwater town in the Virginia swamps could grind into a two-strikes scapegoat and as self-fulfilling as his bitter brooding on "bad blood." The legal side of things is not immaterial: it matters to the magnitude of the crime with which he can be charged that he hides the body and lies about it at such a radiating pitch of guilt that it draws more attention than it diverts, just as it matters that he manages to pull himself back from committing a second, scarier and less justifiable killing in the fury of his panic not to be found out. But what matters more on a level from which he finally has to detach the law is whether Danny Hawkins will ever be able to see something in himself beyond a shame he's incapable of remembering and has never been allowed to forget and whether he will be able to use it to choose for himself a future beyond the one he's always waited to find him:
I'm going back, he thought, as if the scales had fallen from his eyes and he had just seen a miracle. I'm going back. I'm not going over the ridge and down to the big river, I'm not going to run away no more. I'm not going to fight it out with the Winchester because you only need a Winchester when you're going to kill and I ain't going to kill no more. They can hang me on a tree, but I ain't going to kill no more.
The epiphany doesn't come out of nowhere: it comes out of information Danny never had access to before, that changes nothing about what's happened except how he can think about it, which is tilt enough of the kaleidoscope to make the pattern anew. It does not defeat the hopefulness of this ending that its romance isn't wrapped in an ever-after embrace, especially in its film incarnation which consistently intensifies the potentially sentimental to the pitch of the numinous, the inscrutable, the near-supernally weird. Perhaps it disappoints if you demand everything within the elusive definitions of noir to end unhappily, but unfortunately for this expectation too much noir just doesn't. I don't even know if I agree with Brody's thesis that Borzage's filmography should be read through a unified lens of the mysticism of torment, which sounds wonderfully Catholic but too complete to be true, but as I have only seen about half a dozen of his movies, I have confined my complaints to the one I have real data on. I was surprised, reading the novel of Moonrise: not only is the plot transferred with close fidelity and minimal streamlining and much of the dialogue only condensed or rearranged, even visual gestures I had imagined were inventions or translations for the screen were right there on the page to begin with. Some of the screenplay's alterations are its most unsettling and lyrical moments, but others are merely realized from the book with as much beauty as if Strauss' prose style had resembled the Bradbury I got from the cinematography eight years ago. It is not a compromised vision, either the novelist's or the director's. Sometimes a happy ending actually gets to be happy.
Such happy endings as Borzage grants his lovers are often bitterly ironic ones—tacked-on sequences that implausibly bring characters back from certain death. The end of "Living on Velvet" is so unreal as to seem posthumous; "History Is Made at Night" is a transatlantic romance that essentially gives the wreck of the Titanic a happy ending. "Moonrise" (1948), a violence-riddled romantic noir also playing at MOMA, adds to an implausibly miraculous survival a legalistic ending that, in the manner of "Crime and Punishment," will separate its young lovers for years.
I have never seen Living on Velvet (1935). Personally speaking, the ending of History Is Made at Night (1937) has never bothered me because the film has burned through so many conventionally incompatible genres by the time it runs into an iceberg that a last-minute eucatastrophe is no more jarring than Señor Wences playing one of Charles Boyer's hands. But aside from the fact that I find the ending of Moonrise neither implausible nor ironically legalistic, it cannot be fairly described as tacked on because it was neither invented by the director nor imposed by the studio: like the startling majority of this humane and delicate murder ballad of a film, it came directly from the 1946 source novel by Theodore Strauss.
It was not as visible to me when I discovered the film in 2016, but having read the novel for the first time earlier this month and introduced
spatch to the movie last week, the point of the story is the possibility of breaking cycles of violence. Everything right up to the last chapter feels like an inescapable trajectory of doom because the protagonist can't see anything else from the moment he stumbles out of an unequal fight turned manslaughter in awful echo of his father's crime for which he has been bullied and ostracized literally from the cradle, but if the reader-viewer can hold themselves just enough apart from his despairing tunnel vision, we can see sooner than he can the alternate paths he's being offered if he can take the risk of reaching for them instead of driving himself on to destruction through the well-worn channels of his fatalism and self-loathing, his sense of isolation which is simultaneously as real and cruel as a jerkwater town in the Virginia swamps could grind into a two-strikes scapegoat and as self-fulfilling as his bitter brooding on "bad blood." The legal side of things is not immaterial: it matters to the magnitude of the crime with which he can be charged that he hides the body and lies about it at such a radiating pitch of guilt that it draws more attention than it diverts, just as it matters that he manages to pull himself back from committing a second, scarier and less justifiable killing in the fury of his panic not to be found out. But what matters more on a level from which he finally has to detach the law is whether Danny Hawkins will ever be able to see something in himself beyond a shame he's incapable of remembering and has never been allowed to forget and whether he will be able to use it to choose for himself a future beyond the one he's always waited to find him:I'm going back, he thought, as if the scales had fallen from his eyes and he had just seen a miracle. I'm going back. I'm not going over the ridge and down to the big river, I'm not going to run away no more. I'm not going to fight it out with the Winchester because you only need a Winchester when you're going to kill and I ain't going to kill no more. They can hang me on a tree, but I ain't going to kill no more.
The epiphany doesn't come out of nowhere: it comes out of information Danny never had access to before, that changes nothing about what's happened except how he can think about it, which is tilt enough of the kaleidoscope to make the pattern anew. It does not defeat the hopefulness of this ending that its romance isn't wrapped in an ever-after embrace, especially in its film incarnation which consistently intensifies the potentially sentimental to the pitch of the numinous, the inscrutable, the near-supernally weird. Perhaps it disappoints if you demand everything within the elusive definitions of noir to end unhappily, but unfortunately for this expectation too much noir just doesn't. I don't even know if I agree with Brody's thesis that Borzage's filmography should be read through a unified lens of the mysticism of torment, which sounds wonderfully Catholic but too complete to be true, but as I have only seen about half a dozen of his movies, I have confined my complaints to the one I have real data on. I was surprised, reading the novel of Moonrise: not only is the plot transferred with close fidelity and minimal streamlining and much of the dialogue only condensed or rearranged, even visual gestures I had imagined were inventions or translations for the screen were right there on the page to begin with. Some of the screenplay's alterations are its most unsettling and lyrical moments, but others are merely realized from the book with as much beauty as if Strauss' prose style had resembled the Bradbury I got from the cinematography eight years ago. It is not a compromised vision, either the novelist's or the director's. Sometimes a happy ending actually gets to be happy.
