Frank Borzage and Budd Boetticher

Frank Borzage and Budd Boetticher were masters who always remained in the background of the genres to which they devoted themselves. Borzage was the main creator of melodrama at the end of the 1920s and throughout the 1930s but he never got the recognition that Douglas Sirk another master of the genre so justly deserved. He remained in an inferior position and is hardly remembered today as was also the case with John M. Stahl who dedicated himself to the genre had films that were given new versions by Sirk himself but who is now forgotten. They remain as precursors but not as masters and as a result the extraordinary value of films like Seventh Heaven and The Angel of the Streets tends to be forgotten. In the case of Budd Boetticher recognition by French critics_ André Bazin was the first to properly assess his merit_ was not enough to remove him from the second tier in relation to names like John Ford Howard Hawks and Anthony Mann. In Frank Borzage and Budd Boetticher: 1927-1960 Ricardo Luiz de Souza analyzes the works of both filmmakers.