Synopsis
The film opens with two intertitles:
Everywhere … in every town, in every street … we pass, unknowing, human souls made great by love and adversity
Naples … under the smoking menace of Vesuvius … laughter-loving, careless, sordid Naples
Circus impresario Masetto (Armetta), a broken bass drum visible near him, is arguing with a street seller over a sausage. Police officers come between them; Masetto pays for the sausage, and the small circus moves on. The camera pans over people in the street carrying on their usual activities, then stops at a dwelling and goes up the stairs. Angela (Gaynor) is kneeling by the bed of her sick mother. The attending physician warns that her mother has a high fever, and Angela must get his prescription filled at once. Angela looks forlornly in her mother’s purse; she does not have enough money for the prescription. Comforting her mother she goes out to the street to get the money. Angela attempts to prostitute herself but several men ignore her. At the counter of a sausage stand, Angela attempts to grab a customer’s change. She is captured by a policeman who takes her to the police court. She is sentenced to a year in jail for robbery while soliciting on the streets. As the police take her away, Angela gets free and flees. She makes her way back to the garret and finds her mother dead. With the police looking for her, Angela runs through the streets and into the circus parade. Masetto hides her in the broken drum, and Angela is transported to safety.
Some time later, Angela has an act in the circus. When Gino (Farrell), an itinerant painter, disrupts a performance, she upbraids him. Gino follows her back to the circus and soon joins it. Gino paints Angela’s picture, depicting her as a wistful and solemn innocent. Angela falls during her act and breaks her ankle. She and Gino leave the circus and move to Naples where Gino can obtain commissions. Angela does not tell him about her past. In Naples, Gino sells the portrait of Angela. The buyer hires a forger who reworks the painting into a picture of the Madonna. The transformed painting is sold as the work of an old master.
Although poor, Gino and Angela plan to marry. Gino gains a commission to paint a mural in a theater, and he buys wine and food to celebrate. He gives Angela a ring, now they can marry. Angela goes out to buy bread. Neri, the police sergeant who had arrested her for solicitation, recognizes Angela and arrests her again. He allows her to go to Gino for one last hour before serving her sentence. She does not tell Gino about the arrest or that she must go to jail. In the morning, Gino looks for Angela but cannot find her. He believes that Angela has deserted him. Alone and grieving, sitting immoble and slack shouldered, unable to paint, Gino is fired from his commission.
Angela, in jail, is happy thinking that Gino is painting the mural, and she will rejoin him. Fellow inmate Lisette (Kingston), also jailed for soliciting, tells Angela that they are both street angels. Upon her release from prison, Lisette meets Gino, who has become a semi-derelict, and tells him about Angela. Angered, Gino vows to paint women as they are: with the faces of angels and souls as black as hell. Lisette tells him to go to the wharves where there are many like that.
After serving her sentence, Angela looks for Gino. At the theater, she learns about his dismissal. Searching for food, Angela stumbles onto the wharf where loose women congregate. Gino, scornful of women, is searching the area for a subject for his painting: a woman, pure in appearance, but whose soul is foul. He collides with Angela who is stumbling in the fog; thinking the worst, Gino pursues her murderously. She runs into the church where her picture, altered into a portrait of the Madonna, hangs over the altar. As Gino is about to strangle her, he realizes where he is and backs away. He sees her picture and bitterly complains that he had painted her as an innocent. Angela cries out that she remains innocent. Gino studies her and sees the truth. He begs forgiveness, and they embrace. Gino carries her into the night toward their happiness.
Discussion
The simple story brings to life the axiom stated in the first intertitle, the exalted state attained by lovers who have passed through a great test of their love. Angela and Gino fall in love, but, in order to reach a transcendent state they must suffer bitter separation, threatened loss of innocence, and near despair. They reach the depths of despair when Angela, wandering friendless and hungry along the wharf, is attacked by Gino who believes she has become a fallen woman. The painting represents Angela; altered, misrepresented, but ever innocent and good. The lovers emerge from this trial into a blissful union.
After early scenes with Angela fleeing the police and joining the circus, the film concentrates on the emotional states of the lovers. The romanticism of story and setting are depicted in the confident late silent era. A silent film had facility in presenting deep emotion. The actors conveyed their feelings in their faces and body movements and were not constrained by the excessive emotionalism that could result from attempting to express their innermost thoughts in words.
Director Frank Borzage was a subtle and refined romanticist. During this last period of silent film, he was strongly influenced by German expressionism and emulated its use of atmospheric sets to create a subjective version of the world inhabited by the characters in the film. His three silent films with Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, 7th Heaven (1927), Street Angel and Lucky Star (1929), share the theme of lovers whose spiritual union allows them to rise above all earthly tribulations.
Street Angel reinforced Janet Gaynor’s reputation as a luminous
screen presence: wistful, appealing, and refined. Film critic Richard Watts Jr.
described her as
the most sensitive and poetic of all the cinema players
and admired
the poignant beauty she can achieve in pantomine.
Gaynor’s splendid acting
was rewarded in 1929 when she received the first Academy Award for Best
Performance by an Actress for her role in 7th Heaven.
To capture the required atmosphere, Borzage made a trip to Italy to study locales and steep himself in the aura of Naples. He observed one-ring traveling circuses of the type shown in the film. From this visit he supervised construction of an elaborate streetscape intended to capture the squalor of a poor section of the city. For the final scenes, the wharf constructed in the studio was similar to the actual Neapolitan wharf. The scenic designer, Harry Oliver, also worked with Borzage on 7th Heaven and Lucky Star.
Beautifully photographed by Ernest Palmer, cinematographer for Borzage’s 7th Heaven (1927) and The River (1928), and for F.W. Murnau’s 4 Devils (1928) and City Girl (1930), the film’s expressionist style was influenced by Murnau, who had come to Fox Studios from Germany, and whose Sunrise (1927) was a model for using the movie camera with visual flourish. Palmer and Borzage paid special attention to achieving emotionally pervasive effects with camera angles and lighting and with fluid tracking shots. The scene of Janet Gaynor before the magistrate is filmed from behind the judge and over his looming shoulders. Gaynor is apprehensive and diminished before the power of the law. Lighting adds to the mood of scenes. Deep shadows bring a sense of disquiet. Cheerful scenes are brightened by abundant sunlight. Floating mists in the wharf scene add to the doom-laden atmosphere. As the lovers walk toward each other along the wharf, a tracking shot follows each through the fog. At the conclusion, as Farrell carries Gaynor into the night, a spotlight projects a radiant glow over her.
Street Angel received enthusiastic reviews. Variety prophesied that the picture was a sure box office hit, and admired the fine close-ups of Janet Gaynor and the admirable Neapolitan views of streets and alleys portrayed in long and continuous tracking shots. Mordaunt Hall, in The New York Times complimented the sterling artistic quality, noting the film’s gentle and modulated story line and the careful effort to reproduce the atmosphere of a poor Neopolitan neighborhood. He described a visual poetry expressed by scenes that glow, the fog along the riverbank, the atmosphere of the circus, the closeups of the lovers. The painting of Angela, noted throughout and the keynote of the story, looks down on the lovers and brings them together in a spiritual union at the climax. Hall complimented Janet Gaynor’s winsome personality as well suited to the role; her earnestness and dainty charm create sympathy.
The film is adapted from a 1922 play, Lady Christilinda by Monckton
Hoffe, about an equestrienne painting passed off as an old master. The play is set
in England, but Borzage changed the setting to Naples for its picturesque
environment. Although American critics praised the fine Neapolitan settings and
ambience, officials in Fascist Italy condemned them. Benito Mussolini, Italian
Prime Minister, leader of the National Fascist Party, and authoritarian ruler of
Italy from 1922 to 1943, was angered by what he perceived as a distortion of
Italian life. An Italian film critic, Marlo Carli, picking up Mussolini’s
complaints, wrote that the film
distorted Italian life…in the remote past, conditions may have
approached those shown in the picture, but in Mussolini’s Italy, nothing of that
nature exists. Even the classic sun of Italy was obliterated. Can you imagine an
Italian seascape perpetually steeped in fog?
Mussolini dismissed the entire Italian Board of Censorship for approving the film.
A busy film censor, Mussolini had already banned all foreign war films and allowed
their showings only with special permission.
Further Reading