Along with Sunrise, one of two masterpieces porcelain Janet Gaynor made in 1927-she received the very first Best Actress Oscar for her work that year-and no one, except perhaps Murnau, made silent movies as lyrically powerful as Borzage's. Gaynor plays an impoverished waif who falls in love with a sewer worker (Charles Farrell in perhaps the best of the nine movies he made with Gaynor) who first sees her from his humblest of stations beneath a grate in a curb. The film's delicate and patient accumulation of lynchpin details limn out upon its melodramatic trappings the straits of real human hearts in love, suffusing the fabulous tale with a breezy freedom to transcend plausibility, to fly like a dream. The final staircase sequence should be as famous as any climax in film.