Initial Release Date: May 6th, 1927

Position on List (at time of viewing): 778

Not to be confused with its later (James Stewart starring) sound remake, this silent film was one of the first Oscar darlings alongside Sunrise, nabbing best director, actress, and screenplay at the first ever Academy Awards. Although critical fervor has somewhat cooled on it historically, it retains a positive reputation as a classic of silent Hollywood melodrama with a pared down sensibility (at least compared to the bigger sentimental pieces of D.W. Griffith). The film holds up on the strength of its performances and some interesting technical choices, but time hasn’t been entirely kind to it.

The plot of the film is surprising for its time, almost entirely eschewing the glamour and glitz of traditional Hollywood stories for a down and dirty look at the lives of the downtrodden and the oppressed. This focus alone makes it an interesting digression from the traditions of the time. The main characters are a Paris sewage worker named Chico (Charles Farrell) and a woman forced by her evil sister into prostitution named Diane (Janet Gaynor, in her first of two Academy Award winning performances this year). The two are thrust together by fate when he attempts to save her from arrest by claiming they are married. The two are forced to keep up the ruse under the watchful eye of the police and their neighbors, and eventually begin to believe in their lie. Their relationship is still pretty torrid, however, with near-constant fights, and that’s before the war breaks out (I’m sure you can begin to see why I labelled it a melodrama above). There are some borderline supernatural elements brought in to connect the lovers when they are apart, but they mostly just play into the fairy tale tone of the movie as a whole. By the end, there are no real surprises; this one plays out in pretty stereotypical fashion, but is still noteworthy for the uglier portrayal of ‘love in the shadows,’ as it were.

Actually, it’s the ugliness of the movie that is likely to be hardest for the modern viewer to engage with. The film is, to put it mildly, a far sight from anything resembling modern gender politics. To the contemporary moviegoer, this is going to read like an abusive relationship. I spent most of the movie legitimately wishing that the woman would go back to her life on the streets, because it would probably be better for her than staying with the emotionally and physically destructive brute with whom she was stuck. The director and writer aren’t unaware of this, to be clear; Chico is portrayed as a broken and miserable man, violent outwardly because of the violence the world has committed towards him. That doesn’t make it any easier to watch her forgive him over and over again throughout the movie. The lesson is pretty clearly that if you just sacrifice enough and completely abnegate your sense of self, eventually your abusive boyfriend will ‘get better.’ It’s just not a particularly fun theme in the modern world, and it’s pretty hard to watch, despite (or perhaps even because of) the eventual happy ending. This film actually launched its co-stars into one of Hollywood’s most iconic couples, paired together for a dozen other films, but it’s pretty hard to see why looking back now.

One thing that hasn’t aged poorly, however, are the visuals and the production design. This film is sumptuous and beautiful to look at. For once I don’t mean ‘for its time’ or anything like that. The couple’s seventh floor walk-up that gives the movie its name is brilliantly staged, and the introductory shot of it, slowly panning up through all seven floors, is an establishing shot that will be stolen hundreds, if not thousands, of times by Borzage’s successors. A full seven-story building had to be constructed just to get that one shot, and that level of lavishness and detail is constant throughout the entire production. I wouldn’t say that the production looks realistic, necessarily, but that’s not really what it’s going for. It has a kind of fairy tale heightened reality to it, with everything lit softly and the artifice of its studio origins used to make its squalor picturesque. The initial scenes in the sewers of Paris are also worthy of note, using low angles and POV shots to capture the view of the world from the underground. If the magic of Hollywood production is an interest for you, this movie is a treasure trove of invention and creativity from its production team, and is well worth the time on those merits alone.

Ultimately, your mileage out of Seventh Heaven will largely be determined by what you enjoy in films. If you’re primarily there for the story, this one probably isn’t going to come across very well; it’s just too full of meanness and crossed lines for the modern viewer. The acting, though, is quite good and a noted cut above many other silent films of the time, and the technical elements of the film are still a marvel. My wife and I came away with a mostly positive impression despite feeling pretty gross during a few of the scenes, but that’s certainly going to vary from person to person. If nothing else, we still make jokes about how many other movies/directors basically copy the seventh story walk-up scene, so the movie has certainly given us something to remember it by. In the end, if you are interested in silent film, you could do a lot worse than this one, frankly. Silent film is getting close to its end (The Jazz Singer came out six months after this movie), and it’s clear that directors are nearing the peak of the format’s power. This is a good example of what was possible when production, direction, and acting came together into something more than the sum of its parts.

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