Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell

TCM's series on disability in film continues at 8:00 PM tonight with Lucky Star, which is going to be a new-to-me movie. Charles Farrell plays a wheelchair-bound World War I veteran who meets Janet Gaynor. She falls in love with him over the objections of her father, who unsurprisingly wants her to marry somebody who can provide for her better. Sounds like a not uncommon plot in silent movies. But, it's one of nine or ten films Gaynor and Farrell made together at Fox; they were one of the more popular screen teamd of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

I've only recommended one of their joint films together, Sunnyside Up, which I really enjoyed. I have to admit, however, that some of their other films I've seen are not quite to my liking. I just couldn't get into their characters in the overlong Street Angel, and the early talkie Delicious, which aired during TCM's look at immigration back in June, played too much to immigrant stereotypes, not being helped by being a creaky early sound picture.

There are people out there who know more about Gaynor and Farrell than I do. This defunct blog has a nice article on them, although the curmudgeon in me objects to the use of .png files for regular pictures: it's a format that's better for things like graphs, and using it for photos is a memory hog that causes pages to load slowly.

Silent Hollywood has a page with several production stills from Street Angel. I haven't checked out the rest of the site.