The House Next Door

By Kevin B. Lee

[Editor's Note: This is the latest entry in House contributor Kevin B. Lee's Shooting Down Pictures, a record of his ongoing quest to see every title on the list of the 1000 Greatest Films compiled by They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?]

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Frank Borzage’s greatest films celebrate and investigate the miracle of romantic love; but perhaps the greatest miracle of his career was in generating a film of darkly stunning compassion upon one of the most wretched characters conceived in cinema. Danny Hawkins (Dane Clark, in a proto-Method performance of inspired contempt for everything around him) is tortured throughout his young life by his father’s legacy of murder, which he fully inherits within the first 10 minutes of the film, setting off a downward spiral of guilt, rage and violent self-destruction. (The blueprints to Raging Bull are all over this film; a couple of shots seem practically plagiarized).

Borzage’s men have typically been rough-hewn jars of clay shaped and refined by feminine light, but Danny Hawkins is a festering pool of mud oozing from the film’s swampy environs. He’s saved by Borzage’s ultimate faith in redemptive grace, embodied by the fiancee of the man Danny kills, who unfathomably falls in love with Danny despite nearly being killed by him in a stunning car accident. Her unlikely attraction to him is made credible through our own, an empathy accomplished through Borzage’s ability to plant the viewer squarely in the passionate, angst-ridden hell of Danny’s worldview.

Starting with a wildly expressive flashback opening on through a series of terrifying crisis moments shot and cut with dizzying intensity (a swamp killing; a rainstorm car crash; a bedroom strangulation; a suicidal leap from a ferris wheel), it’s a world cloaked in perpetual night, virile in its violence, seductive in its shadows. The civic-minded sobriety of the daylight scenes, where everyone from the local sheriff to a self-exiled, swamp-dwelling Negro (a powerfully melancholy Rex Ingram) espouse liberal compassion for poor Danny, can’t compete with the allure of destructive darkness that pervades this film. Even the sentimental strings in the soundtrack, employed heavily during interludes of romantic redemption, stir reserves of disconsolate ache. If the redemptive, sober climax that resolves the narrative feels less than fully earned, it’s because Borzage has perhaps succeeded too well at mining the bottomless chasm of a man’s affliction. But such a degree of achievement in suffering wrought into art embodies its own salvation.
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To read the rest of the article at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.