Anything But Silent
7th Heaven
Live Theatre Organ Accompaniment by Ben Model
Tuesday, January 15th at 7:30 PM
$11 Members | $16 Public
Frank Borzage's masterpiece about two social outcasts in Paris who find refuge and passion in a 7th floor apartment is one of the cinema's strongest expression of the transcendent power of romantic love.
Casting Fox contract player Janet Gaynor as a Parisian street urchin and newcomer Charles Farrell as the sanitation worker who loves her, director Frank Borzage created one of the great screen couples, an alliance that would continue through 11 more films. Chico, a sewer worker with lofty aspirations, saves a young prostitute named Diane from the murderous rage of her tyrannical sister. When the police arrive to arrest her, Chico spontaneously claims that she is his wife. Forced to maintain this facade or else both face prison sentences, Chico reluctantly allows Diane to live with him -- and his 7th floor apartment gradually becomes an idyllic refuge for the two social outcasts. However, the dark spectre of World War I has begun to descend upon France, and Chico and Diane cannot help but fall under its shadow. 7th Heaven stands as Borzage’s strongest expression of the transcendent power of romantic love, evoking emotions of such strength and purity that only the dream world of silent film could contain them. At the first Academy Awards ceremony, the film won Oscars for Gaynor (Best Actress), Borzage (Best Director) and Benjamin Glazer (Best Adapted Screenplay). This presentation features a new digital restoration, funded by Twentieth Century Fox, and based on the only surviving nitrate print from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. (USA, 1927, 110 min., NR, DCP | Dir. Frank Borzage)
Ben Model is one of America’s leading silent film accompanists,
and has been playing piano and organ for silent films at the New York
MoMA since 1984, and the CAC since 2006.
