Frank Borzage
The River

LA RECENSIONE

A large part of the dramatic film The River, directed in 1929 by Frank Borzage and starring Charles Farrell and Mary Duncan, has been lost. A reconstructed version with the approximately 45 minutes of surviving footage, using still images and explanatory captions to fill in the missing scenes, was produced by the Filmmuseum of Munich, in collaboration with the cinémathèques of Switzerland and Luxembourg. This version was screened in 2006 by the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. A film of extreme sensuality and rawness thanks to the excellent lead actors, both very much in sync, it is set in a claustrophobic site in the Rocky Mountains, where despite the unsettling presence of a trained crow, the battle between good and evil will always have an uncertain outcome until the end.
Here I reproduce a good review from 1999 by Martino Breve

"A dangerous water vortex, an unsettling crow that watches and guards the woman, the setting in an abysmal crevasse, violent snowstorms, the anxiety that arises from taking the last train, while the femme fatale mocks the naive young man. Frank Borzage's is a dark love melodrama steeped in horror and gothic. Masterful is the play of glances and expressions that orchestrates the mutual attraction between Good and Evil, between blissful naivety and cruel cynicism, between the impetus (the epic struggle between the woodcutter and nature) of a healthy body and mind and the lethal sensuality of a Mad Femme, languid, dominating, whose erotic charge is trapped between the explicit invitation to possess her without commitment and the grand gesture of love in the warm final embrace of the body. Thanks also to performances that have little affectation and seek spontaneity as much as possible, the viewer is led to love both the shyness and naivety of the young man caught in a trap, and, after an initial moment of fear, the coldness of a woman victim of loneliness and disillusionment, as attractive in her mischievous smiles as she is formidable and ultimately redeemed. Powerful, daring, sweet."

It is surprising that this excellent film has received almost no mention, as it is equally astonishing the lack of resonance it had in Borzage's homeland, despite him being born in the United States but of Italian origin, and moreover a winner of two Academy Awards in the very year they were first inaugurated.

A final curiosity on the side for those who have seen or wish to see the film: the actor who is handcuffed and accused of murder at the beginning, the man of the beguiling Femme fatale Rosalee, the stunning Mary Duncan, is Alfred Sabato (Alfredo Sabato), a Calabrian emigrant and antifascist, who was also a collaborator of DeMille as well as an actor and screenwriter; having entered the powerful American Hollywood Studios circuit and financially supported by Italotone Inc., a cooperative headed by the Italian singer and actor Alberto Rabagliati (who came to Hollywood in 1927 as the winner of a contest held by Fox to find a look-alike of the late "myth" Rodolfo Valentino) and sponsored by Californian winegrowers, he directed his first (and only) film, titled Sei tu l’amore? as a director, which would be the first ever Italian sound film.