The final part of Franks Borzage's trilogy of silent romantic melodramas starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell is probably the best. The leads are adorable and there is an endearing touch of comedy. She plays an uneducated country girl who falls in love with a soldier just back from the Great War.
He instructs her in the rudiments of manners and hygiene and uncovers the lovely, maturing woman within... There's a charming scene when he washes her hair over and over until he discovers... she's a blonde. But this is a Borzage film, so fate isn't quite so benign.
Farrell had an accident in France and came back a paraplegic. He is placed in the agonising position of educating Gaynor for the benefit of the mendacious and irresponsible Sergeant who partly brought about the injury. OK, Farrell's recovery just in time to save his sweetheart from a disastrous marriage is most improbable...
But that's the transformative potential of true love in a Borzage film! They have a spiritual quality; a miraculous expression of ethereal romance. Sure, it's sentimental, but it communicates a strange, intangible sense of the supernatural, of the out-of body. Of the soul as it struggles to survive the physical world.