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.