A Great Big Girl Like Me: The Films of Marie Dressler

Notes

Notes Chapter 1: Tillie’s Punctured Romance The epigraph that opens this chapter is from “A Great Big Girl Like Me,” lyrics by Edgar Smith, sung by Marie Dressler in the Broadway show Higgledy-Piggledy, 1904. 1. In 1986,Douglas Gomery challenged historians on using the cliché“TheTiffany of Studios” to describe MGM in the 1930s: “Marie Dressler pushes us to reconsider the ‘Tiffany’ image, for she surely represented MGM to the movie-going public of America in the Depression.” Gomery, The Hollywood Studio System (New York: St. Martin’s, 1986), 64. Since that time, history textbooks have made a point of noting the popularity of Dressler’s films. Few critical studies have discussed their importance. 2. Matthew Kennedy, Marie Dressler: A Biography; With a Listing of Major Stage Performances, a Filmography and a Discography (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1999), 9, 29. 3. Lyrics by Edgar Smith, 1909. 4. See “Marie Dressler Not Wife of J. H. Dalton Who Is Buried Here,” Evening Leader (Corning, N.Y.), December 3, 1921, 12; and “Dalton Sought to Wed Marie Dressler,” New York Times, December 2, 1921, 8. 5. For a thorough account of this film’s centrality to censorship debates of the late silent era, see Frank R.Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 6. Time, August 7, 1933. 7. Jack Jamison, “Hollywood’s Cruelest Story,” Modern Screen, July 1932, 28. 8. Josephine Jarvis, “Queen Marie of Hollywood,” Photoplay, January 1932, 33. 9. “Marie Dressler Rallies from Coma,” New York Times, July 1, 1934, 23; “Dressler ’s End Near,” Los Angeles Examiner, June 29, 1934, 1. 10. Buster Keaton and Charles Samuels, My Wonderful World of Slapstick (Cambridge : De Capo, 1982, 1960), 201. Keaton finished the remark, “. . . (until Lucille Ball appeared).” 11. The epigraph for this section comes from Will Rogers, foreword to Marie Dressler’s My Own Story as Told to Mildred Harrington (Boston: Little, Brown, 1934), vii. 12. Francisco Alberoni, “The Powerless Elite: Theory and Sociological Research on the Phenomenon of the Stars,” in Sociology of Mass Communications, ed. Denis McQuail (London: Penguin, 1972), 75–98. 13. See Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI, 1998), 20. 14. Ibid., 152. 15. Ibid., 154. 16. This list is suggestive, rather than exhaustive. These are a few of the more prominent women directors and screenwriters working in America in the silent era. Around the world, there were hundreds more. 17. Janet Staiger, “Authorship Approaches,” in Authorship in Film, ed. David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger (New York: Routledge, 2003), 30. 18. Jane Gaines,“Of Cabbages and Authors,” in A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, ed. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 111. 19. Cari Beauchamp, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (New York: Scribner, 1997), 199. 20. Samuel Marx, A Gaudy Spree: The Literary Life of Hollywood in the 1930’s When the West Was Fun (New York: F. Watts, 1987), 31. 21. Beauchamp, Without Lying Down, 356. 22. Ibid., 12. 23. The epigraph for this section comes from George Hill, New York Post, quoted in Kennedy, Marie Dressler, 4. 24. “Marie Dressler Is Her Own Stage Manager,” Star Weekly, December 5, 1914, quoted in Roberta Ann Raider,“A Descriptive Study of the Acting of Marie Dressler” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1970), 86. 25. Dressler, My Own Story, 152. 26. Amy Leslie,“Real Fun at Illinois,” Chicago News, April 1905, quoted in Raider, “Descriptive Study,” 98. 27. Archie Bell, “Scene from ‘A Mix-Up,’” Cleveland Leader, November 8, 1914, quoted in Raider, “Descriptive Study,” 85–86. 28. “Marie Dressler Entertains,” New York Times, February 26, 1913, 8. 29. Raider, “Descriptive Study,” 176. 30. Marie Dressler, The Life Story of an Ugly Duckling (New York: R. M. McBride, 1924), 64–65. 31. Review, New York Dramatic Mirror, February 26, 1913, quoted in Raider,“Descriptive Study,” 177. 32. Bo Berglund, program notes for Tillie’s Punctured Romance, Twenty-third Annual Silent Film Festival, Pordenone, Italy, October 9–16, 2004. 33. “Marie Dressler Strong for the Impromptu,” Moving Picture World, December 29, 1917. 34. The epigraph for this section comes from “The Stage and Its Players,” New York Times, March 4, 1906, X3. 35. Linda Williams,“Melodrama Revised,” in RefiguringAmerican Film Genres, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 42. 36. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 44–49...