My Best Girl

The restoration of this 1927 Mary Pickford romance provides the centerpiece of the Boston International Festival of Women's Cinema. It's a beauty. Pickford, an actress with an extraordinary combination of spunk and delicacy whose work has been neglected for decades, plays a shopgirl who falls in love with her boss's son (Buddy Rogers), thinking he's a stock-room clerk. In one scene, director Sam Taylor juxtaposes the elegant midday meal ferried by servants to Rogers's debutante girl friend (Avonne Taylor) with the box lunch he and Pickford share as they huddle together cozily in a crate like a toy house. In another, Pickford, having discovered his identity, runs away from his parents' mansion through the rainy streets, then pauses before a domestic scene in the window of his father's store. These sequences could have been sentimental tripe, but Taylor, Pickford, and the photographer, Charles Rosher, bring so much feeling to them that they're transformed. (The scene where Pickford runs away from Rogers and his family suggests moments from Murnau's Sunrise, from the same year, a film Rosher also shot.) The last 20 minutes are conventional; the rest is perfectly lovely.

-- Steve Vineberg