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At first blush, Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall is a radical departure for its star Mary Pickford.
Based on a popular novel by Charles Major, Dorothy Vernon is a lavish costume drama set during the conflict between Queen Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. Pickford plays the title character, a real-life aristocrat who for reasons history has not quite remembered managed to alienate both sides in the battle of royal succession. The film is full of court intrigue, murder plots, sword fights—in short, the sort of movie Pickford's husband Douglas Fairbanks might have made during this period.
But as the story develops, the Pickford we know and love quickly emerges. She plays an adult role for once, but an eighteen year old on the eve of an arranged marriage to a scheming cousin who wants to use the occasion to attract the presence of Elizabeth, whom he plans to murder in a plot to put Mary Stuart on the throne of England.
If you know your British history, you know Mary Stuart never sat upon the throne of England so I don't think it's a spoiler to say that the plucky, feisty, bonny Dorothy—the traits most typical of a Pickford character—saves the day. (For more background about Pickford, click here.)
She succeeds with the help of her true love, Sir John Manners, essayed by Pickford's brother-in-law, Allan Forrest. (The film was a real family affair, with Pickford's sister Lottie playing Dorothy's lady-in-waiting.) Forrest plays his part in the Douglas Fairbanks style, with lots of swashbuckling and leaping about, and even throwing his back and laughing uproariously, a patented Fairbanks move.
And therein lies the film's weakness—Forrest is no Douglas Fairbanks. That fact is made abundantly clear in his very first scene, a shot of his wide muscular back as a doctor attends to wounds received in battle. Forrest was, in fact, a quite slender lad, and the back is doubled by none other than Fairbanks himself, who was filming The Thief of Bagdad one set over. I couldn't help but wonder how much more fun the film would have been if Fairbanks had actually played the role of John Manners. Not only would the acting and swordplay have been better, but the outsized nature of his magnetic personality would have short-circuited the need for so much character exposition that bogs down the beginning of the film.
But, alas, Fairbanks and Pickford made only one movie together, the 1929 talkie, The Taming of the Shrew.
Still, a Pickford movie is primarily about Mary Pickford, and she does not disappoint. She had one of the most expressive faces of the silent era, and one of the most appealing personas. Throw in the wonderful costumes and Pickford's stunt work performed herself when her double was injured—including a particularly dangerous gallop up a three-foot wide stair to the top of a narrow stone wall—and you've got a pretty entertaining movie on your hands.
The film wasn't one of Pickford's blockbuster smashes upon its release in 1924, but it did turn a tidy profit and was a nice prestige release for Pickford's studio, United Artists.
A newly-restored 35 mm print of the film is playing now in a limited run in select cities. Film historian Christel Schmidt, author of Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies, will be touring with the film, as will Ben Model, who provides live musical accompaniment. If you get a chance to see it before it heads back to the archives at the Cinematheque Royale de Belgique, by all means, don't miss it.
I may have given the impression in my enthusiasm for Mary Pickford (e.g., here) that I think that every movie she ever made is a must-see classic. In fact, as with every great performer, her films tend to distill into four broad categories—the Great, the Good, the Bad and the Pleasantly Forgettable.
The Greats would include, for example, Stella Maris and Sparrows. Among the Bad are The Little American and most of her sound era work. And the Pleasantly Forgettable include, I suppose, such films as The Pride of the Clan and A Romance of the Redwoods.
Daddy-Long-Legs, the best known of her pictures from 1919 and one of the most highly-rated of her career, I would class as "Good"—and one that could have been Great, if the filmmakers had taken a bit more care in adapting Jean Webster's episodic novel.
For those who have seen Mary Pickford's work before, Daddy-Long-Legs will have a familiar feel to it. Pickford plays a foundling, Jerusha "Judy" Abbott, who grows up in a brutal orphanage, more labor camp than loving home, as oppressive as a prison. When we first meet Judy, she's a plucky twelve year old, just the sort of "tweener" Pickford made a career of, and just as you'd expect of a Pickford character, she's bonny and brave and full of well-meaning mischief, leading a revolt against a steady diet of prunes, getting drunk on apple jack and knocking the matron into a well.
Judy is also bright, kind-hearted and responsible, providing the younger children at the orphanage with the only maternal love they've ever known. In the main, her benefactors are cold and cruel, the sort who do their good deeds in public so that others might praise them, while in private meting out discipline—such as burning Judy's hand on a hot stove—that these days would earn them a felony charge.
But they're not all bad, and a wealthy trustee agrees to provide Judy with a college scholarship, providing that he remain anonymous. Judy sees only his tall, gangly shadow cast on a wall and dubs him "Dear Daddy-Long-Legs," writing to him as such in chatty letters from her new school.
That Daddy-Long-Legs might also be one of the eligible bachelors she meets while in school goes without saying.
Pickford was one of the true stars of the silent era, and when as here she was working within her range as an actress, nobody was better. She's utterly convincing as both a twelve year old and as a young woman, and it's her performance that carries the movie. "She was brilliantly expressive," wrote director-historian Peter Bogdanovich for Blogdanovich, "absolutely real, equally on the money at every second in comedy, drama and all points between. You want to see good modern movie acting, check out Mary Pickford in Daddy-Long-Legs."
The resulting film was one of the biggest hits of Pickford's career. As film historian Kevin Brownlow wrote, "Daddy-Long-Legs was the archetypal Mary Pickford film. It had all the elements an audience could hope for."
Is Daddy-Long-Legs the equal of Pickford's best films, The Poor Little Rich Girl, Stella Maris or Sparrows? No, I don't think so. The source novel by Jean Webster Daddy-Long-Legs may have been a hardy perennial—"beloved" according to one review I read (later versions of the story featured Janet Gaynor, Shirley Temple, Fred Astaire and even Japanese anime)—but the film plays bit like Dickens-Lite, Oliver Twist without Fagan, Great Expectations without Miss Haversham.
And while director Marshall Neilan and screenwriter Agnes Christine Johnson turned in some topnotch work in their careers (Stella Maris and Show People, respectively), neither gave their best effort here. Scenes drag a bit, characters are introduced and forgotten, and at times the action is described through intertitles rather than shown on screen—to me a cardinal sin for a silent movie and a sign that neither the director nor the writer completely solved the problem of reducing an epic, episodic tale into a digestible ninety-minute narrative.
Still, Pickford is at the top of her game, and despite its flaws, Daddy-Long-Legs is satisfying entertainment, and a must-see for any fan of this legendary actress.
This is my contribution to the Mary Pickford Blogathon, hosted by one of the Monkey's favorite bloggers, KC of Classic Movies.
Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley was the second of five movies Mary Pickford made in 1918, and the first after the spectacular achievement of Stella Maris. Here, Pickford mines a familiar vein—the collision of the upper and lower classes told through the eyes of a spirited girl from the wrong side of the tracks—this time played mostly for comedy. Although not as iconic as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or The Poor Little Rich Girl, Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley is a prime example of Pickford's lasting appeal.
Adapted from Belle K. Miniates's novel by Pickford's friend and favorite screenwriter, the legendary Frances Marion, Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley is the story of Amarilly Jenkins, "a debutante" of the tenement slum known as "Clothes Line Alley." To support her brothers and sisters, Amarilly takes a job selling cigarettes in a dive bar and winds up falling for a rich, handsome swell out slumming with his rich, handsome pals. The comedy turns on Amarilly's battles with his snobbish family, with our Mary getting the best of them before finally realizing what she really wants in life.
Throughout her career, Pickford excelled at light comedy and Amarilly is no exception, turning a ride on the back of a motorcycle, a tumble through a doorway on the threshold of her first kiss, and her enthusiasm for a barroom brawl into nice bits of humor. But it was mostly her bright, searching eyes, her shy, knowing smile, and, above all, her plucky, indomitable spirit that made her so adorable. In fact, if one word could sum up Pickford's extraordinary appeal during the era, "plucky" would be it.
As you might expect from a film written by Marion, the social observations are tart and biting without overwhelming the comedy. The rich are alternately portrayed as stuffy, lifeless bores and perfumed, pampered bums. Amarilly's love interest (Norman Kerry) is an effete drunk who ducks his work and his family with equal abandon. His best friend is a deadbeat trust fund baby who hogs the guest room and never picks up a check. And his mother is a pompous dowager who founds a charity that actively despises the objects of its care.
The resulting study of American social mobility is more Pygmalion than Cinderella and ends with a twist that thumbs its nose at both literary conventions. I quite can't tell if the film's politics are progressive or reactionary—maybe a bit of both—but no matter: Amarilly's happiness is the only item on the bipartisan agenda.
To direct Amarilly, Pickford chose Marshall Neilan, who had overseen the hugely successful Stella Maris. This time around, Neilan required none of the special effects or camera tricks that made Pickford's dual role in Stella Maris possible, but his direction is a solid example of the classical Hollywood style then emerging. The pacing is nimble and assured, the acting solid, and the camera work as light on its feet as the story itself.
One shot in particular, that of Amarilly's steady boyfriend finding the new guy's top hat on the landing outside her door—when compared with, say, Mack Sennett's rather obvious and by then painfully dated park bench sex comedies—shows just how far the movies had come in the space of a couple of years.
Look also for the way Neilan composes shots contrasting the worlds of the wealthy and the poor. In the former, Amarilly's beau is lost in vast expanses of sterile marble; in the latter, Amarilly's loving family is tucked into a warm, snug room. Neilan further underscores the divide by often framing Amarilly standing in doorways and perched on window sills, literally and symbolically straddling two worlds. Neilan's notions about poverty may be sentimental, but he's making his argument visually, cinematically, rather than spelling everything out with clumsy intertitles.
Despite the chronic alcoholism that made him unreliable and eventually ended his career, Pickford adored Neilan. "[T]o my way of thinking, he was the best director ever, better than the great D.W. Griffith."
The admiration was mutual. "She has something," Neilan said, "that irrespective of looks or age or anything else, will live on. She has personality."
Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley premiered on March 11, 1918, and to the surprise of no one, became one of the biggest hits of the year.
"Mary Pickford," wrote Motion Picture Magazine, "has gone to an entirely different well of characterization for Amarilly and drawn up as full a pitcher of success as in the renowned Stella Maris."
After Amarilly, Pickford continued to play plucky young girls in films such as Daddy-Long-Legs, Pollyanna, Tess of the Storm Country and Sparrows. The range of her roles was narrow and often fit the star like a straightjacket. "I'm sick of Cinderella parts," she once admitted, "of wearing rags and tatters. I want to wear smart clothes and play the lover." But fed-up or not, Pickford was not one to trifle with the expectations of a fan base that had made her the most powerful woman in the history of Hollywood.
"I am a servant of the people," she said, "and I have never forgotten that."
Only after the advent of sound made further little girl roles impossible did Pickford finally abandon the "Little Mary" persona for good. And as she feared, her audience abandoned her as well.
To read Part One of this essay, click here.
Little Mary Takes Charge
Mary Pickford was already a star by 1917, of course—she'd been a star, in fact, before anyone even knew her name.
Known as "America's Sweetheart," Pickford was actually Canadian, born Gladys Marie Smith in Toronto in 1892. Shortly after the death of her alcoholic father, the seven year old Gladys hit the stage, and along with her brother and sister, began to tour Canada and the United States regularly as part of a series of low-rent theater troupes.
Hoping to become a Broadway actress, Smith moved to New York in 1906 and changed her name to Mary Pickford. While she did land a few parts, by 1909 she was desperate for work and auditioned for a role in a D.W. Griffith film, and although she didn't get the part, Griffith offered her a contract at $10 a day with a guarantee of $40 a week—double the going rate.
In keeping with the practice of the times, Pickford received no billing for her efforts—not even the director received a credit in those days—but audiences knew what they liked, and though they didn't know Pickford's name, they—and the theater owners who paid to exhibit her films—clamored for more of "The Girl with the Golden Curls."
While at Biograph Studios, Pickford made over 130 short films with Griffith. But despite that early success and their later partnership (along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks) in forming United Artists, Pickford didn't much care for the "lordly" Griffith, and when he elevated newcomer Mae Marsh over her, she departed for the employ of Adolph Zukor, head of Lasky's Famous Players (later Paramount).
One of her earliest feature-length films for Zukor, 1914's Tess of the Storm Country, was a smash hit and made Pickford an international star.
Although audiences may have thought of her as the perennially adolescent "Little Mary," by the beginning of 1917, Pickford was a very grown up twenty-four and knew better than anyone what her fans wanted to see—better, certainly, than the men who ran the studio. After starting the year with an adult role—the leader of a Scottish fishing village in The Pride of the Clan, worth tracking down for the scene where she drives errant parishioners to church with a bullwhip—Pickford, over the objections of Zukor, chose a popular stageplay of the day, The Poor Little Rich Girl as her next starring vehicle.
Looking back now, the story of a girl who nearly meets with a tragic end would seem to be right in Pickford's wheelhouse, but the man initially chosen to helm the production, Zukor's top director Cecil B. DeMille, wasn't so sure, and when Pickford insisted her friend Frances Marion write the screenplay, the autocratic DeMille attempted to put his foot down.
Instead, it was Pickford who won the ensuing battle of wills, and when she successfully lobbied to have DeMille replaced with Maurice Tourneur, who had directed The Pride of the Clan, she may have been the first star in movie history to fire a director. She wouldn't be the last.
The basic story of The Poor Little Rich Girl—Gwendolyn's parents neglect her, their wealth isolates her, the family servants prey upon her—could easily have become the cheap, sentimental claptrap Zukor feared it would be. It works, though, thanks to Marion's script, Tourneur's direction and above all, Pickford's performance.
Frances Marion you know, if you've been following this blog for a while. From 1915 to 1933, the two-time Oscar winner was the highest paid and most respected writer in Hollywood, shaping the screen images of some of Hollywood's greatest stars including Lillian Gish, Greta Garbo, Wallace Beery, Marie Dressler—and, of course, Mary Pickford, writing seventeen movies for the latter between 1915 and 1921. Along with Anita Loos, Marion revolutionized the art of intertitle writing, turning dull exposition into clever bon mots worth the price of admission in their own right. More importantly, she grasped that movies were primarily visual, and she suggested ways of showing character and action that were uniquely adapted to the new medium. (Read more about her here.)
Marion's screen adaptation boasted an unprecedented blend of comedy and melodrama that worried the studio but delighted Pickford—indeed, the two women added comedic bits throughout filming, exasperating the fastidious Tourneur. On closer inspection, the comedy that so puzzled Zukor and Tourneur was really the writer's happy choice to draw Gwendolyn not as a saint or as a symbol, but as a real girl—by turns, impetuous, flighty, bored, sullen, but also curious, kind, imaginative and fun. Gwen is so appealing that by the time catastrophe strikes, the audience is deeply invested in her fate.
To create the illusion that Pickford, already tiny at five feet, was young enough to pass for a child, director Tourneur surrounded her with oversize sets and furniture, and hired tall actors whom he stood on platforms or in the extreme foreground, making them look even taller. He also shot several scenes of Pickford lying down in a bed or sitting in an over-sized chair where it's impossible to judge the relative heights of the other actors.
Remembered now, if at all, as the father of Jacques Tourneur (Cat People, Out of the Past), Maurice Tourneur proves here and in his follow-up film, The Blue Bird, that he was one of the most adept visual stylists of the period. Aside from his technical skill in helping Pickford pass for a young girl, a couple of fantasy sequences—Gwen's literal interpretations of a two-faced woman and bears on Wall Street—are well done and typical of Tourneur's style. (Both The Poor Little Rich Girl and The Blue Bird are preserved in the National Film Registry.)
But even with Marion's screenplay and Tourneur's technical skill, the film wouldn't work without the best "trick" of all—Pickford's ability to behave like a young girl would, not overplaying her part as if in a broad farce or a Victorian melodrama, just playing it. She kicks, she yawns, she flings mud at little boys, but far from coming across as a spoiled brat, she's a spunky underdog fighting arbitrary authority even as she longs for a normal childhood (something Pickford herself never had).
As Daniel Eagan writes in America's Film Legacy, "[I]t's a measure of her talent and appeal that she could make a child of privilege appear deprived."
Studio executives were horrified when they saw the finished film (you can see it for yourself here) and, convinced he had a very expensive flop on his hands, Zukor sent a chastened Pickford out west to make two films with the aforementioned Cecil B. DeMille—what fun that must have been for both director and star!
Andre Soares of Alt Film Guide picks the first, A Romance of the Redwoods—the story of an outlaw who steals a dead man's identity only to fall in love with the deceased's niece—as the best picture of 1917, and it is a fine picture, but I see it primarily as a showcase for Elliott Dexter. The second film, a World War I propaganda piece called The Little American, is, frankly, a mess, at the end pairing a typically charming Pickford with a would-be rapist rather than with a brave, self-sacrificing suitor for no better reason than that the former is played by a better looking actor than the latter.
In any event, neither film did much at the box office and meanwhile, a strange thing was happening with The Poor Little Rich Girl, which Zukor had released only to fulfill a contractual obligation to theater owners—audiences loved it, finding it by turns funny and poignant. Indeed, The Poor Little Rich Girl was one of the biggest hits of Pickford's career.
After that, Zukor gave up trying to control his star and instead signed her to a new contract, giving her $10,000 a week, 50% of her films' profits, and complete creative control.
"She knew what she was worth," wrote biographer Eileen Whitfield, "and she didn't hesitate to ask for it. She was a woman in complete control."
As a follow-up to The Poor Little Rich Girl, Pickford chose a similar subject, this time the Kate Douglas Wiggin novel, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The story of a poor girl sent to live with a pair of maiden aunts—sort of a cross between Charles Dickens and Louisa May Alcott—is maybe the most typical example of the kind of movies Pickford made during the remainder of the silent era.
To handle the adaptation of the novel, Pickford again chose her friend and closest collaborator, Frances Marion. To direct, she selected Marshall Neilan, a journeyman whose movie career began when he sold a car to director Allan Dwan. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was the beginning of a brief but productive partnership with Pickford that produced her best film, Stella Maris, as well as Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, M'Liss, Daddy-Long-Legs and Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall.
With the exception of her economic situation, Pickford plays the same sort of character as in The Poor Little Rich Girl—a feisty underdog who melts the stony hearts of everyone she meets. Her age here is a little ambiguous; the novel suggests Rebecca is "ten or eleven," but the film seems to indicate she's more like fourteen, still a stretch considering Pickford had celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday before filming began, but there are plenty of five foot tall fourteen year olds running around and in any event, her fans were more than willing to suspend disbelief.
After the unexpected success of The Poor Little Rich Girl, Pickford and Marion were determined to follow the same formula, including plenty of comedy bits—poking the preacher's snooty daughter with an umbrella, fainting dead away when a handsome young man buys 350 bars of the soap she's selling for a contest, reciting a scandalous poem for a town gathering—with a soupçon of pathos in the final act.
As usual, Frances Marion takes the opportunity to poke fun at social conventions such as mix-and-match morality—when confronted with competing aphorisms, "Thou Shalt Not Steal" and "God Helps Those Who Help Themselves," Rebecca opts for the latter to justify eating a piece of pie—as well as the withered humanity underlying so much of religious fanaticism.
Viewed back-to-back with The Poor Little Rich Girl, it's clear Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is the inferior film. The story is more episodic, the emotions touched on less intense. Nor was Neilan the visual stylist that Tourneur was—he drank too much and often left the direction to Pickford herself—but overall, it's a fun picture, and maybe the best at highlighting Pickford's lighter side. (In 1933, Pickford hired the by-then unhireable Neilan to direct what would be her last film, Secrets, then wound up firing him when he was simply too drunk to work.)
The finished product was box office gold, an even bigger hit than The Poor Little Rich Girl. In fact, the two films finished second and third on the list of the year's biggest grossing films, behind only Theda Bara's Cleopatra.
The "little girl" films of Mary Pickford aren't for everybody. A modern audience has little practice at accepting an adult actor in the role of a child and the effort doesn't work in every picture—for example, in The Little Princess, also from 1917, Pickford looks more like a wizened gnome than a little girl.
Too, the stories Pickford chose to tell—innocent tales completely devoid of irony—seem to be out of fashion these days, even at a studio like Disney. Indeed, Pickford herself chafed at the constant parade of little girl roles—"I'm sick of Cinderella parts," she once said, "of wearing rags and tatters. I want to wear smart clothes and play the lover."—while remaining determined to give her fans exactly what they wanted, which they did to the tune of millions of tickets sold.
But if you're willing to give yourself to it, Pickford's little girls are bright, kind, spunky, mischievous—a blueprint for the Shirley Temple movies that were so popular during the Depression—and provide a chance to re-experience simple pleasures undistilled.
"Make them laugh, make them cry, and back to laughter," she said. "What do people want to go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that."
She won a competitive Oscar for acting in 1930 and an honorary one in 1976 "in recognition of her unique contributions to the film industry and the development of film as an artistic medium."
Pickford dominated the movie and cultural landscape for another decade, a superstar before there was such a word, with a string of box office hits, the financial acumen to found and run United Artists, and a celebrity that today's tabloid fodder can't begin to imagine, for example, drawing a crowd of 300,000 when she and Douglas Fairbanks honeymooned in Paris.
In fact, I'd say there's no equivalent to Pickford in today's Hollywood, and you'd have to combine three women—say, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Kate Middleton—to equal one Mary Pickford. And even then, you wouldn't come close to matching the lasting impact of her legacy on the art and business of film.
[To continue to Part Three, "The Chaplin Mutuals," click here.]
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