No Greater Glory
Directed by Frank Borzage
At Film Forum Feb. 26 (double bill with This Day and Age)
Running Time: 74 min.
They took our marbles!” a boy cries when one neighborhood gang in 1930s Budapest humiliates another.That’s how Frank Borzage’s No Greater Glory brilliantly sums up war as boys’ folly. Classical Hollywood’s most spiritual filmmaker, Borzage made nothing so trivial as an “anti-war” movie. No Greater Glory starts
out with a sad-satirical war montage and a post- WWI schoolteacher
romantically telling his juvenile students, “There is nothing finer
than patriotism, nothing nobler than war in defense of the country we
love.”Yet Borzage goes deeper than mere patriotism and transcends
propaganda of any sort. Richer than what Renoir called “The Grand
Illusion,” Borzage’s faith allows this boys’ story to posit the
certainty of brotherhood.
Among Borzage experts, the 1934 No Greater Glory is
argued as possibly his best movie. Clearly it’s his most original and
personal film, and its rare showing as part of Film Forum’s Champagne
& Breadlines series makes it this week’s must-see.
We need Borzage’s Depression-era largesse as a reminder of our basic humanity in the face of political and economic crisis. No Greater Glory typifies
an era in popular culture when citizens not only trusted their
government but trusted each other—and that makes Borzage’s proposition
useful even during Obamamania. In the film’s fable-like enchantment,
this world of boys (no girl gangmembers) shrewdly distills manhood/
masculinity to its humane essence.The story of frail Nemecsek’s (George
P. Breakston) desire to join a local gang and show his loyalty to the
bigger boys surpasses the rhetoric of comradeship.
The
battle with a rival gang over a lumberyard playlot reveals both gangs
occupying essentially the same turf. It’s a microcosm of the larger
world’s egotistical squabbling.The East European setting provides an
allegory for teens who look and talk like the ethnic whites of the
early 20th-century Lower East Side. Nemecsek’s faith reminds the boys
(and us) of the trust and need for dignity Americans used to have in
common.
No Greater Glory takes place in a clearer
world, before Red- and Blue-state divisions disguised nasty class
antagonisms. Nemecsek’s father declares, “We are [all] poor people,”
because Borzage’s Depression tales presumed shared values.Thus,
Nemecsek wins the admiration of rival captains Boka (Jimmy Butler) and
Feri Ats (Frankie Darro); he even protects the treacherous Gareb
(Jackie Searl).This generosity makes the film greatly moving. Modern
films like Benjamin Button and There Will Be Blood are
so unengaged with the times that they ignore the movements of mind and
heart that The Depression revealed as essential human qualities.
It’s
no accident that a gang’s pitbull mascot is named Hector, evoking
Euripides’ sympathetic dramas of the Trojan War. Borzage also surpasses
pacifism through his sensitivity to his character’s deepest feelings. The telepathy in Borzage’s famous love stories Seventh Heaven,Three Comrades,A Man’s Castle is also the profound fellow feeling among No Greater Glory’s Paul Street Boys, the sailors of Shipmates Forever and the soldiers of Borzage’s underrated masterwork, Stage Door Canteen. His
angelic portraiture turns this childhood tale into one of struggling
souls. Frankie Darro’s tough boy in short-legged pants that show off
his athletic leanness embodies a male ideal (wait until Abercrombie
& Fitch gets wind of Darro’s iconography); and a gang’s spying
mission inside a botanical garden lets Nemecsek witness a rainstorm
while inside a greenhouse— both examples of refined human experience.
From
here, Borzage’s war metaphor becomes extraordinary. Uninfected by
Bertolt Brecht’s communist analysis of war, which has dominated pop
fiction since WWII (as explained in last year’s documentary Theater of War), Borzage pushed No Greater Glory to one of the most powerful emotional crescendos ever.
In the recent DVD box set Murnau, Borzage and Fox, a documentary about Borzage mentioned he so abhorred war that he even refused to shoot battle scenes. (His friend John Ford shot those in Borzage’s 1935 A Farewell to Arms.) That may explain why this film’s exchange of feeling between gangs, parents and children transcends the initial declaration of patriotism. Borzage’s emotional strength comes from political abstraction Brecht could never achieve: purity.
