DVD of the Week: “Living on Velvet”

Compared to the director Frank Borzage, the sentimental populist Frank Capra was a gimlet-eyed cynic, and Borzage’s romantic 1935 drama “Living on Velvet” (which I discuss in this clip) is a case in point. It’s a roller-coaster ride of emotional extremes that Borzage depicts in surprising counter-currents: the protagonist, Terry Parker (George Brent), lives with an unbearable burden of guilt—and a pariah’s stain—that he bears with blithe frivolity, as if reveling in his degradation. He runs off with his best friend’s fiancée—and his best friend (a wealthy man) lends them a house in which to live. The redemptive love only drives Terry deeper into his old habits of light-hearted self-abasement. But when he takes a chance on a big venture that might change his fortunes—well, imagine the Capra treatment, and see Borzage’s movie. For one thing, there’s a kind of transcendent glow to his way of shooting rapture, an alchemical mystery of soulful communion in his images, which is why an eyeful of tears at a moment meant for celebration have the impact of a welling wave’s impending cataclysm. Also, Borzage’s sense of romance has something of a ubiquitous power, like a particular light that pervades his films: it’s a faith so radical that it embraces even the most exotic or recalcitrant possibilities, which is why there’s so much unusual, eye-catching, ambiguous, or simply peculiar side business in his movies—and that calculated near-randomness gives them a documentary tinge. (Especially worth seeing is “Man’s Castle,” from 1933, his seriocomic, tender, yet violent view of life in a New York tent city during the Depression.)