Seventh Heaven

At the inaugural Academy Awards in 1929, Frank Borzage's "Seventh Heaven," won for Director and Adapted Screenplay, F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise" won for Cinematography and "Unique and Artistic" production (a sort of high-art "Best Picture" award that disappeared the next year), and the two shared Janet Gaynor's Best Actress award. This confluence of directors, studio and era is essentially the grounding for this year's answer to "Ford at Fox." "Murnau, Borzage and Fox" comes in at a smaller scale (12 features on 12 discs, with supplements, reconstructions and a documentary), but in other ways it's an even more dedicated labor of cinema love, spotlighting two great directors who are not household names. F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise" is one of the unequivocal masterpieces of world cinema, a marriage of the poetry of his cinema with the machinery of Hollywood, and "City Girl," his final Fox production, is a lovely rural drama. (His lost "Four Devils" is celebrated with a documentary and accompanying book.)

But the revelation of this set is the work of Frank Borzage, the great romantic of silent cinema and a director whose work is woefully underrepresented on home video. This collection finally brings his holy trinity of romantic classics to DVD: "Seventh Heaven," "Street Angel" and "Lucky Star." All starring Fox's eternal young lovers, Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, they are among the most lush silent films ever made and the most entrancing celebrations of the redemptive power of love in all of cinema. The collection also features the silent "Lazybones" and six early sound films (including "Bad Girl," which earned him his second Best Director Oscar), plus a reconstruction of the partially lost "The River," a glorious film in a terrible state of degradation. Apart from "The River," the films look quite good, and the collection is supplemented by the new documentary "Murnau, Borzage and Fox." The discs are collected in a large, album-sized case and come with two beautifully illustrated books.