Spotlight: Mary Pickford
Pickford produced her own films, chose the directors, and co-founded United Artists. The little-girl roles paid; she was in her twenties when she played most of them. Stella Maris is the one where she split the frame with a second part. Sparrows is the swamp. My Best Girl is the last silent, and she is playing her own age. Frances Marion wrote several of these. The Love Light is one of the few Marion directed. The sweetheart label was a sales line. The pictures are about work, money, and how long a contract can keep you twelve.
9 films
Fanchon, the Cricket
1915 · James Kirkwood
Twenty-two, a wild girl from the woods, blamed for everything. Already the type: stubborn, outdoor, not fragile. The Gish sisters are in the village dance, uncredited. Watch her refuse the landowner's son. The contract had not yet decided her age.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
1917 · Marshall Neilan
Twenty-four, playing a child, and the contract begins. Frances Marion wrote it; Pleasanton stood in for Maine. She plays Rebecca as a negotiator, and the aunts lose. It made the little-girl part harder to leave. Watch her decide how young to be in each scene.
The Little American
1917 · Joseph Levering, Cecil B. DeMille
DeMille and the war. An American girl in France, a German, a Frenchman, the Lusitania as a plot point. The star is the argument: the girl next door has chosen a side. Watch her in the occupied château. Victim and flag in the same frame, and she knows which one pays.
The Poor Little Rich Girl
1917 · Maurice Tourneur
A rich child kept indoors, a sleeping draught, and a dream city built out of the servants' figures of speech. Tourneur gives the fantasy real architecture: a garden of forgetful flowers, two-faced people. She was twenty-four. The dream is where Tourneur earns his credit.
Stella Maris
1918 · Marshall Neilan
The split frame. Pickford as a sheltered invalid and as Unity Blake, a scarred orphan in service in the same house, double-exposed so they share the shot. Unity, hunched and plain, is the part she wanted. Photoplay said the public would not take her in thin parts after this. It did anyway, which is the collection's argument.
The Love Light
1921 · Frances Marion
Frances Marion directing, Pickford producing. An Italian village girl keeps a light for a lover lost at sea and takes in a man who lies about who he is. Darker than the sweetheart line, and it did not start a cycle. Watch her at the lamp. Two women made this, and it looks it.
Little Annie Rooney
1925 · William Beaudine
Thirty-three, a tenement kid with a gang, a cop killed, a block turning on itself. She produced it and the rooftop fight is hers. The audience wanted the child, the money proved it, and she could still do the walk. Watch the walk. That is the contract in a gait.
Sparrows
1926 · William Beaudine
The swamp. A baby farm on several acres of stage bog, Grimes with a dog, and a crawl over a log with the children. Mohr said there was not an alligator within ten miles; the danger is a set and a lens. The escape is still the sequence. She carried the babies herself.
My Best Girl
1927 · Sam Taylor
The last silent, and she is playing her own age. A stockroom girl, the owner's son under another name, and a fall among the crates. Watch the crate ballet. A woman finally allowed to be her own age on screen, and it plays like relief.