Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies

The Films of Mary Pickford

THE FILMS OF MARY PICKFORD 205 Poster for the Pickford comedy Kiki (1931) from the Eastman Theatre in Rochester, New York. THE FILMS OF MARY PICKFORD James Card T T he two greatest names in the cinema are, I beg to reiterate , Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin. . . . Theirs are the greatest names in the cinema and from an historical point of view they always will be great.” The quotation is from Iris Barry’s Let’s Go to the Movies, originally published in 1926. Further on in the same book, Miss Barry adds the name of Douglas Fairbanks and observes: “Fairbanks, his wife and Chaplin are, and behave like, serious artists: in that is their great strength . . . they are, largely, the history of the cinema.”⁄ Certainly, no one writing film history has ever neglected the work of Chaplin. And Fairbanks, along with receiving generous treatment in the pages of most film histories, has even enjoyed the undivided attention of Alistair Cooke in a monograph. But one may search in vain for a serious discussion and analysis of the work of Mary Pickford. In Arthur Knight’s The Liveliest Art—A Panoramic History of the Movies, reference is made to only one Fairbanks film (Robin Hood) and to only three of Pickford’s pictures; one of the three (The Little American) is cited as a DeMille production, with no mention at all of Pickford. The nearest approach any recent writer has made to the Pickford contribution occurs in Richard Gri≈th’s text to his 1957 picture book The Movies. Observing that she was the “undisputed queen of the screen” for twenty-three years and “for fourteen of these years she was the most popular woman in the world,” Gri≈th asks himself, “Why? It becomes increasingly di≈cult to answer the question . . . the answer can only be a guess.”¤ The same question asked forty-one years earlier was no less di≈cult. It was stated by the reviewer of the Pickford film Poor Little Peppina, which appeared in 1916. Writing in the New York Dramatic Mirror (March 4, 1916), the reviewer complained: To analyze the acting of Mary Pickford is about as satisfactory as trying to draw a definite conclusion from a metaphysical premise. After much circumlocution, after the use of many words and the expenditure of much grey matter one is forced to the inevitable conclusion that Mary Pickford is Mary Pickford. She has a charm, a manner, an expression that is all her own. She seems to have the happy faculty of becoming for the time being the character she is portraying. At no time does one gather the impression that Mary Pickford is acting. She is the epitome of naturalness. But why go on? The sum and substance of it all is that Mary Pickford is unique, and irrespective of the strength or weakness of any picture in which she appears, the fact that Mary Pickford appears in it makes it a good picture. A 1917 publicity photo of silent cinema’s three greatest stars: Charlie Chaplin, Pickford (in costume), and Douglas Fairbanks. This is an edited version of an article first published in Image: The Journal of the George Eastman House of Photography, December 1959. James Card 206 “ Before dismissing this little rhapsody with a feeling of present-day superiority over a naïve enthusiasm of forty-three years ago, consider these words of theoretician Paul Rotha, who was never baΩed by a Dreyer, Pudovkin, Pabst, or Murnau. In words reminiscent of those of Iris Barry, Rotha wrote: “Both Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks are extremely serious about this film business. . . . They are both of extreme importance to the cinema.With Chaplin, Stroheim, and, to a lesser extent, Gri≈th, they are the outstanding figures of the American cinema.” Rotha devoted five pages of his Film Till Now to the work of Fairbanks. But when it came to Pickford, he faltered. “Of Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks I find di≈culty in writing, for there is a consciousness of vagueness, an indefinable emotion as to her precise degree of accomplishment.”‹ Rotha, writing in 1930, was having the same trouble as the reviewer in 1916. Perhaps it required the perception of a poet to solve the mystery of Mary Pickford’s gifts.Vachel Lindsay had no doubts about her, and in 1915...