Our best girl
Rediscovering Mary Pickford
by Steve Vineberg
"SWEETHEART: THE FILMS OF MARY PICKFORD," At the Brattle, Sundays through June 14.
Eileen Whitfield's superb 1997 biography of Mary Pickford -- the best book I
read last year -- is the portrait of a complex, tragic woman who was also one
of the greatest of all film actresses. Her book leaves you salivating for the
movies, which have been pretty much unseen for decades. Having just screened
the 1927 My Best Girl as the centerpiece of the Boston International
Festival of Women's Cinema, the Brattle is now offering four more Pickfords
over the next month, a sample of the dozens of movies (almost all of them,
miraculously, still in existence) that she made during her heyday. They confirm
Whitfield's point of view that we've all been missing something wonderful.
Pickford was stage-trained by the time she entered the movies to work for D.W.
Griffith. Like everyone he mentored, she quickly grew accustomed to playing a
wide variety of roles in both comedy and melodrama. And since her theatrical
roots were the same as Griffith's, it's not surprising to find the same
influences in the properties she built around herself once she became a star
and a producer in her own right: Dickens, gothic tales, Victorian sentimental
fiction and stage spectacle. In Suds (May 24) she plays a cockney gamine
who slaves in a laundry and dreams of the gentleman who will rescue her. In
Little Annie Rooney (May 31) she's a Manhattan Irish urchin who donates
her blood to save the life of a local gang leader shot by her own brother. In
the Dickensian Sparrows (June 7) she's an orphan maltreated by her
guardians.
Pickford's worldwide popularity in the '20s was unprecedented, and watching
her in these roles (and as the shopgirl in My Best Girl), you see
precisely why. She was a remarkably canny performer, and she didn't hold back.
In the most memorable sequence in Little Annie Rooney, from 1925,
Pickford's Annie prepares a surprise birthday celebration for her father, a cop
who, unknown to her, has been killed in a brawl at the local social club. When
another officer comes by to relay the sad news, she lights the candles and
scurries under the kitchen table, so when he comes in, all she sees is the
uniform and for a moment doesn't realize it isn't her father. Pickford (who
also wrote the screenplay, under a pseudonym) and the director, William
Beaudine, shape the scene in emotional terms, playing out the dramatic line
slowly so that you take in each stage of Annie's response -- which begins (in a
reversal of the traditional pattern) with resignation and ends in grief.
Pickford surrounded herself with talented visual artists: directors like
Beaudine and Sam Taylor; photographers like Charles Rosher, Hal Mohr, and Karl
Struss; art directors like Harry Oliver, William Cameron Menzies, and Laurence
Irving. All of these pictures, including the single talkie, The Taming of
the Shrew (June 14 -- one of her last movies, it co-starred her second
husband and business partner, Douglas Fairbanks), look magnificent. Beaudine's
Sparrows (1926), which I think is equal to any film I've seen from the
late years of the silent era, is set in a swamp, where the quicksand is an
ever-present threat to Pickford's adolescent Molly and the crew of orphans to
whom she's a surrogate mother. The movie offers some indelible images. When the
malignant Grimeses sell one of the orphans, the others hide in the barn (as
they always do when company comes), but their tiny hands wave goodbye to their
friend through the slats. Escaping from their cruel guardians, they climb a
tree to avoid a slimy alligator in the swamp below, but their combined weight
brings the tree down perilously near the creature's waiting open jaws.
You'll be surprised at how dark Sparrows is (and at how touching the
slices of High Anglican Victoriana are: this is melodrama that transcends
itself, as it can in Dickens and Griffith). And Suds, which parallels
the hapless Amanda's neglect with that of the noble, wrecked horse that pulls
the laundry's delivery wagon, permits the horse a happy ending but not Amanda:
she's rejected by her would-be gentleman -- he finds her embarrassing. Pickford
mugs too much in Suds, but the movie stays with you.
So does the unexpected moment in The Taming of the Shrew when she
enters her bridegroom's bedchamber for the first time and feels an unfamiliar
combination of shyness and romantic longing. Pickford overplays the verse, and
though she could carry off much younger roles in just a few years earlier,
somehow she comes across as too matronly for Katherine. But the movie (directed
by Sam Taylor) has a visual elegance and confidence that you seldom see in
films from 1929, when most were weighed down by the new sound equipment. And it
attempts to redress the balance of Shakespeare's comedy: this version of the
contest between Kate and Petruchio ends in a draw. All four of these pictures
are worth a look. Like Whitfield's book, they illuminate a corner of movie
history that's been dark far too long.