I Take This Woman

W. S. \“Woody\” Van Dyke II inaugurated his career at age three as a stage actor, in the company of his widowed actress-mother. When acting jobs were scarce, young Van Dyke worked as a miner, electrician and (allegedly) a soldier-for-hire in Mexico during the ‘teens. In 1916, he was hired as one of several assistants to director D.W. Griffith, working in this capacity on Griffith’s mammoth Intolerance. After assisting director James Young at Paramount, Van Dyke was allowed to direct his first solo film in 1917. He spent most of the 1920s laboring on quickie Westerns, earning a reputation for speed and efficiency. In 1928, he was brought into MGM’s troubled production White Shadows on the South Seas, which, under the snail’s-pace direction of Robert J. Flaherty (a brilliant documentary maker whose skills at fictional filmmaking was slight), was running way behind schedule. When White Shadows opened to critical and audience approval, Van Dyke was elevated to Hollywood’s A-list of directors, though even when handed huge budgets and big stars he never altered his rush-it-through directorial technique (the one exception to this was his year-long sojourn on Trader Horn ¹⁹³¹). “One Take Woody” was often derided by his fellow MGM directors, who bemoaned Van Dyke’s “carelessness” and “sloppiness.” However, Van Dyke’s best films — The Thin Man (1934), San Francisco (1936), It’s a Wonderful World (1939) — hold up far better than the works of many of his more art-conscious colleagues. A favorite of no-nonsense leading men like Clark Gable and William Powell, Van Dyke was not held in as high esteem by certain actresses accustomed to being fussed over for hours before stepping in front of the cameras; still, he got along quite well with the temparamental Norma Shearer when he took over direction of the troubled Shearer epic Marie Antoinette (1938). Working at MGM until 1942, the year before his death, Van Dyke could take pride in the fact that virtually all his films made money for the studio — and virtually none went over budget. —allmovie guide

Frank Borzage (April 23, 1894 – June 19, 1962) was an Academy Award-winning American film director and actor famed for his mystical romanticism.

Borzage’s father, Luigi, was born in Roncone, Austria-Hungary in 1859. As a stone mason, he sometimes worked in Switzerland; he met his future wife, Maria Ruegg (1860, Ricken – 1947), in Zürich, where she worked in a silk factory. Luigi Borzaga immigrated to Hazleton, Pennsylvania in the early 1880s; he worked as a coal miner there and soon brought his Swiss fiancée with him.

The couple married in Hazleton in 1883, and had their first child, Henry, in Wyoming in 1885. They settled in the Mormon stronghold of Salt Lake City, Utah, where they gave birth to Frank, and remained until 1919. Altogether, the couple had fourteen children, eight of whom survived childhood: Henry (1885-1971), Mary, Bill (1892-1973), Frank, Daniel (1896-1975, a performer and member of the John Ford Stock Company), Lew (1898-1974), Dolly (1901) and Susan (1905). Luigi Borzaga died in Los Angeles in a car accident in 1934; his wife died of cancer in 1947.

Borzage started working in Hollywood in 1912 as an actor, and continued until 1917. His directorial debut came in 1915 with his film The Pitch o’ Chance.

On June 7, 1916, Borzage married vaudeville and film actress Lorena “Rena” B. Rogers in Los Angeles. Although he loved her and treated her well, he and his wife were not compatible: she preferred parties, luxury, and travel, while he was less social, except in his athletic activities. Furthermore, Rena secretly had an abortion around 1921— Borzage loved children—and had several female lovers. Despite their common affection, Rena became dissatisfied with her husband, who, according to family members, had discreet affairs with Lupe Vélez, Mary Pickford, Marion Davies, Joan Crawford, and Hedy Lamarr. By 1940 the strain on their marriage had become too great. At a double celebration for Rena’s birthday and their anniversary on June 7, Borzage, who then had a drinking problem, suddenly left his mansion and moved out. A divorce was granted on January 22, 1941; Rena obtained $250,000 in damages and interest. Despite this, the couple maintained contact.

Borzage died of cancer in 1962 at the age of 68, and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California. For his contributions to film, Borzage was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Borzage was a successful director throughout the 1920s but reached his peak in the late silent and early sound era. Absorbing visual influences from the German director F.W. Murnau, who was also resident at Fox at this time, he developed his own style of lushly visual romanticism in a hugely successful series of films starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, including Seventh Heaven (1927), for which he won the first Academy Award for Directing, Street Angel (1928) and Lucky Star (1929). (He won a second Oscar for 1931’s Bad Girl.)

Borzage’s trademark was intense identification with the feelings of young lovers in the face of adversity, love in his films triumphing over such trials as World War I (Seventh Heaven and A Farewell to Arms (1932)), disability (Lucky Star), the Depression (Man’s Castle (1933)), a thinly-disguised version of the Titanic disaster in History Is Made at Night (1937), and the rise of Nazism, a theme which Borzage had virtually to himself among Hollywood filmmakers from Little Man, What Now? (1933) to Three Comrades (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1940). His work after 1940, however, took a turn into religiosity in such films as Strange Cargo (1940) and The Big Fisherman (1959), and his once extremely high reputation fell as his earlier films became hard to see; of his later work only the film noir Moonrise (1948) has enjoyed much critical acclaim. After 1948, his output was sporadic, and his last film work was sequences in Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1962 film L’Atlantide (Journey Beneath The Desert), for which he was uncredited. —Wikipedia