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Lucky Star

Live Musical Accompaniment
Screening on Film
Recently Restored
Directed by Frank Borzage.
With Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, Guinn “Big Boy” Williams.
US, 1929, 35mm, black & white, silent, 99 min.

Gaynor’s last collaboration with Borzage finds her once again playing opposite Charles Farrell in a melancholy melodrama about an embattled couple whose love for each other overcomes all odds. Set largely in a rural Midwestern village, Lucky Star features Gaynor as an impoverished, willful young woman enamored of Farrell’s wheelchair-bound WWI veteran. The misty, fairy-tale-like milieu, fabricated entirely inside the studio, is bathed in Borzage’s trademark chiaroscuro lighting and soft-focus camera style. Originally released with short sequences of spoken dialogue and sound effects, Lucky Star was technically a hybrid work, a picture poised on the transition point between the mature silent cinema and the nascent talkie boom. With no known prints in existence, the film was long considered “lost” to history until an intact nitrate copy (minus any sound elements) was recently rediscovered and restored by the Nederlands Filmmuseum.

PRECEDED BY

  • Pep of the Lazy “J”

    Directed by Victor Noerdinger.
    With Edmund Cobb, Janet Gaynor.
    US, 1926, 35mm, black & white, silent, 24 min.

Pep of the Lazy “J” is typical of a series of Universal shorts that starred Janet Gaynor and Edmund Cobb.  Life at the Lazy “J” ranch is upset by the arrival of three strangers.  Pep O’Keefe (Cobb) is a down-on-his-luck cowpoke who saunters into the ranch looking for work.  Instead, he falls for missing heiress May Kennedy, who is accompanied by friend June Adams, played by the fetching 19-year-old Miss Gaynor.  This short makes up for its slight plot with all-out boxing matches, rousing horseback rescues, and the star-quality of Janet Gaynor, whose presence here was noticed by Fox, who cast her to co-star in The Johnstown Flood.

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