Street Angel movie storyline. In Naples, the young Angela needs 20 Lira to buy medicine for her terminal mother. She sees the prostitutes on the street and she decides to sell her body to earn the money. She does not succeed and tries to steal money from a customer of a street vendor. Angela is arrested and sentenced to one year in prison but she escapes and finds her mother dead. While chased by the policemen, she is hidden by Mascetto, who owns a traveling circus, and she works with his team.
Angela meets the painter Gino and they fall in love with each other. When Angela breaks her ankle in a fall, she returns to Naples with Gino that grows as painter and is hired to paint a mural in the church. Gino proposes to marry Angela but a policeman recognizes Angela and gives one hour to her to say goodbye to Gino. Angela does not tell him about her past and vanishes from his life.
One year later, Angela is released and she immediately goes to see the mural painted by her beloved Gino. However she sees the name of Roberti instead and she learns that Gino had been fired. Now the starving Angela wanders on the harbor. Meanwhile a prostitute tells to Gino that his love is a “street angel” and he decides to paint again, not the face, but the soul of prostitutes and seeks a model on the harbor. When they stumble on each other, Gino sees her soul through her eyes and they stay together.
Street Angel is a 1928 American silent drama film with a Movietone soundtrack, directed by Frank Borzage, adapted by Harry H. Caldwell, Katherine Hilliker, Philip Klein, Marion Orth and Henry Roberts Symonds from the play Lady Cristilinda by Monckton Hoffe. As one of the early, transitional sound film releases, it did not include recorded dialogue, but used intertitles along with recorded sound effects and musical selections.
Street Angel was one of three movies for which Janet Gaynor received an Academy Award for Best Actress in 1929; the others were F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and Borzage’s 7th Heaven. Street Angel was also nominated for Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography.
The acting award was given in 1929 and the other two in 1930, which accords the movie the distinction of being one of only two films to ever receive an Oscar nomination in two different years that was not a foreign language film. The other was The Quiet One nominated in 1949 for Documentary Feature and 1950 for Story and Screenplay.
Street Angel (1928)
Directed by: Frank Borzage
Starring: Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, Alberto Rabagliati, Natalie Kingston, Henry Armetta, Guido Trento, Lewis Borzage Sr., Dolly Borzage, Jennie Bruno, Dick Dickinson, Italia Frandi
Screenplay by: Philip Klein, Henry Roberts Symonds
Cinematography by: Paul Ivano, Ernest Palmer
Film Editing by: Barney Wolf
Costume Design by: Kathleen Kay
Art Department: Harry Oliver
Music by: Erno Rapee
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Fox Film Corporation
Release Date: April 9, 1928
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