ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

Asad Almond A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

Hayleigh Joseph This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

Jemima It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

herb-924-148734 This one has the strengths and weaknesses of the late silent films. It is not as good as 'Sunrise,' but it has some wonderful b/w deep field shots, with a distant town down a mountainside and a busy harbor for a background. Also -- some fine Monet-like fogbound portside shots with the characters walking in silhouette toward each other. Some of the scenes are too long and too sentimental -- to show off Janet Gaynor's skill at pathos, and the theme music and whistling is badly overused. But the portrait, which becomes "Madonnaized" as an old master does capture Gaynor's pure character. It is taken from the lovers as her purity is (for the time being) stolen from her, but then in the final scene the image and reality are reunited. In a sense the Madonna blesses the two reunited lovers. That's well done and is reminiscent of the use of portraits in Poe's "Oval Portrait" and Wilde's "Picture of Doran Grey." I wonder how the young artist realized that it was his picture or, if he did, registered no surprise at finding it over the altar of a church. But the use of the picture as a kind of psychic energy was carried through nicely.

mgmax SPOILER NOTE: this contains spoilers about Street Angel and its predecessor, Seventh Heaven.Seventh Heaven is somewhere in the middle of the pack of silent films that are still seen today, but in its day it was a huge success, and it's no mystery why. With World War I less than a decade behind it, Seventh Heaven (1927) offered shameless fulfillment of one of the most persistent fantasies of the war-- that your loved one, believed dead, will rise and come back to you if you just wish for it with all your heart. The film is mainly remembered as a proletarian Parisian romance between the sewer-worker Chico (Charles Farrell) and the waif Diane (Janet Gaynor), set on a visually active representation of a Paris neighborhood in which the stars and the camera are always roaming over stairs and rooftops, but the last act and climax are driven by the war and by Diane's wishing that her beloved will come back to her which, struggling against great odds (including having been blinded), he does in a scene of sentimentality rendered with the kind of no-holds-barred brio that only the silent cinema, with its booming organs and dreamlike absorption, could achieve. Not surprisingly, Street Angel was an attempt to make lightning strike twice with the same stars and director in another tale of lovers parted by circumstances bigger than themselves-- a theme Borzage would continue to explore not only in the third of his Gaynor-Farrell silents, Lucky Star, but throughout the 1930s in such films as Man's Castle (in which it's the Depression), History Is Made at Night (a Titanic-like shipwreck), and Three Comrades (the rise of Nazism). Gaynor plays another waif driven, in desperation, to prostitution (quite frankly portrayed); arrested for theft while soliciting before she actually has to do anything sordid, she escapes with a circus, meets painter Farrell, they fall rapturously in love-- and then a policeman remembers where he's seen her. She goes away in secret rather than let Farrell know her shame, but alas, he turns to drink in disappointment at the perfidy of women, and in the big climax, it is not that he must crawl back to her from the dead, but that she must convince him of her purity before he does what a man's gotta do. Using a similar moving camera on a stage set-like cityscape, but with lighting far more influenced by German Expressionism than Seventh Heaven (the result of following Sunrise in production at Fox, no doubt), Street Angel is visually impressive but the plot, and the attitudes that underlie it, are repugnant-- it's one thing for a young couple to be torn apart by war, it's another to be torn apart by your own sanctimony. And part of the reason we may find it unappealing is because we're not swept away by Farrell's character in this tale-- it's the kind of role that, if it didn't kill his career outright, certainly helped type him as a relic of the more florid silent era as sound progressed. One of the truisms of movies is that men happily in love are unwatchable dopes. Happy couples are in general undramatic, to be interesting there needs to be some form of conflict before you find happiness in the fadeout (your two families are feuding; you're fighting like cats and dogs on the Twentieth Century; your elderly father has hired a private detective to keep you and your sister out of trouble). But the man in particular stands a high chance of looking like a big emasculated idiot if he just spends the movie gooning at his gal. Borzage's Man's Castle (1932) shows how to do this right-- Spencer Tracy does manly stuff out in the world to try to get by, while Loretta Young tries to make them a happy home on no money. Street Angel does it all wrong-- Farrell, who has a strapping physique and handsome face but a little pursed mouth, just stares and moons at Gaynor like a lovesick beagle, which means we already can't stand him by the time he turns out to be a moralistic jerk-slash-pretentious-artiste. (It doesn't help that the early soundtrack breaks into either whistling or saccharine serenading on a regular basis. I guess we can be grateful that no one yodels.)Film fans may find delights in Borzage's photography and in Gaynor's more appealing performance as the long-suffering gal, but today at least, Street Angel proves to be the least appealing of the "trilogy" next to Seventh Heaven or Lucky Star.

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre In the first year of the Academy Awards, the voting was based on the performer's entire body of work for that year. Thus, Emil Jannings won the first Best Actor Oscar (although they weren't cried 'Oscar' yet) for two films he made in 1928, whilst Janet Gaynor won the first Best Actress Oscar for three films she made that year. One of her three films was 'Street Angel', so her starring role in this film has to be reckoned as one-third of an Oscar-winning performance. But surely Gaynor's magnificent and multi-layered performance in 'Sunrise' deserves most of the credit for that award. 'Sunrise' is such a masterpiece, it's hard to see how 'Street Angel' could compare with it.This film takes place in Naples, where 'street angel' is apparently the term for a prostitute. Janet Gaynor usually played virginal good girls. Here, she gets arrested for prostitution. Impressively, the script avoids the easy excuse of making Gaynor a victim of mistaken arrest. Instead, through clever but plausible script machinations, Gaynor's heroine has legitimate reasons for feeling some guilt and stigma for being a prostitute while making it clear to the audience that she hasn't actually done the deed. As an Italian peasant girl, Gaynor impressively uses Neapolitan hand gestures and head movements in a few scenes, but does not employ them consistently.As to leading man Charles Farrell, the less said the better. Gaynor and Farrell were the most popular romantic team in silent films, but I've always found Farrell impossibly good-looking without the acting ability to match. His portrayal of an embittered paraplegic in 'Lucky Star' is his only performance that deeply impressed me.Gaynor typically played good-girl roles (in an interview, she noted 'I was the essence of first love'), so I was pleasantly surprised by her appearance here in a circus costume that shows off her exquisite figure in black tights and leotard. While Gaynor balances upside-down, the camera lingers from her slipper-shod feet downwards along her extended legs to her torso. What a woman! Gaynor, who usually dressed much more modestly, is clearly delighted to have this chance to show her stuff.The production design is exquisite, with dozens of highly individualised stucco buildings. They actually look like a street in Naples, not a movie set. Henry Armetta restrains his histrionics, for once. Natalie Kingston is enticing as a local slut named Lisetta. In his brief role as an Auguste-style circus clown, I was very impressed with an obscure actor named Louis Liggett, who died shortly after this film was released: he shows real talent here.The plot of this film is soap-opera bathos; the most interesting thing about it is that Gaynor's character serves a year in the workhouse (conveniently getting sprung on the same day as her rival, Lisetta, even though the latter was arrested much later) and then she emerges wearing a surprisingly stylish pair of high-heeled pumps: are these prison-issue in Italy? I'll rate this movie 5 out of 10, mostly for Gaynor's nuanced performance and partly for the brief scenes of her performing in black tights.

cygnus58 "Street Angel" misses greatness by inches. One of three famous late silent movies starring Janet Gaynor (the others were "Sunrise" and "Seventh Heaven"), it's an ultra-romantic melodrama with enormous power. Frank Borzage, a specialist in this kind of film, pulls out all the stops to make this seem almost like an other-worldly fable; the story is painted in broad brush strokes, and the plot has a few echoes of "Les Miserables." The sets and cinematography are outstanding; Gaynor is heartbreakingly beautiful, and her performance is superb. The film's biggest flaw-- almost the only one-- is that near the end it indulges in a wildly improbable coincidence, and it's always awkward when a film closes on a note like that. It isn't quite as good as "Sunrise--" very few movies are-- but for most of its running length this rich, lush film is an absolute joy to watch.