The Pre-1920s List: Discussion and Suggestions (Decade Project Vol. 4)

[knives]

Haha, Kino, autocorrect got me

Aw, that makes way more sense. They're really great, though I've been going through a lot of old Image stuff too.

[knives]

Rapsodia satanica
I was expecting this film to be merely another in the prima donna genre so popular at the time. Yet while it does feature some good vamping it is much more attuned to the faust story that gives it its structure. It plays directly upon faust's spirit (more Marlowe than Goethe admittedly) complicating and even undermining the whole concept of the vampire which I suppose explains fully why I liked this so much even as other prima donna pictures have faltered for me. Instead of just being a bad girl defining the vamp character in relation to mistaken ideas of forgotten youth and true feelings on masculine abuse gives a sincere dramatic weight to the proceedings that breed tragedy in a powerful way most likely foreign to audiences of the time due to changing moors on gender. This play between staying true to both the model of story and genre the film is working in doesn't just help the protagonist, but also the love interest who tends to be nobodies in these films and is instead given enough to be tragic in his own fashion. The ending is the whole highlight of the film though. Not only does it give a full throated aesthetic beauty that feels daring, but it is the one moment where the film chooses prima donna traditions over faust resulting in such a brilliant recontextualization that I'm surprised it hasn't been done elsewhere. Without giving too much away the film doesn't end with Lyda Borelli, in an amazing performance, as martyr or even necessarily tragic, but rather hopeful at the possibility of acceptance. It's modern in such a direct way that I almost have to assume that I'm imposing my own politics on the film.

His Picture in the Paper
Does anyone else find it weird how in these early comedies Fairbanks looks a good couple of decades older than in the later adventure films. Maybe it's the weird haircuts. The cultural aspects of this with the vegetarianism are the most amusing, but the fact that I said amusing rather than funny says it all really. Fairbanks at the stage in his career seems more invested in really weird setups than delivering on jokes or interesting action sequences. That can work for something as short and genuinely weird as The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, but for these longer romances the ideas seem to run out of steam too quickly with the whole just faltering.

Flirting with Fate
This is the most stable of the films in the Flicker Alley set so far. The premise is classic enough, a man depressed by love and money hires a killer to kill himself only to regret the decision, and the road to get there is told in a pretty coherent fashion. Unfortunately the dramatics don't hold the film together enough to make this blush of sanity work. The lead up to the killer plot is dull as dirt without any real jokes and the dramatic crux of it all is so dependent on Fairbanks being the worst sort of artistic personality that killing him off seems like a good idea. The movie picks up in the second half, but really only to amusing and not even much of that. I will say though all of the imagine spots that are reminiscent of early Edison experiments in their staging are quite good.

[Tommaso]

For True Heart Susie the OOP Image disc is best, but Flicker Alley reproduced it as a DVDR recently.

There's also now a German release by arte edition, newly restored. English intertitles.

[matrixschmatrix]

Ooh, that looks excellent. Is there anything else I might want to pick up for this project from Amazon.de?

[TMDaines]

Edition Filmmuseum's Nerven for sure.

[Tommaso]

And Edition Filmmuseum's 2-disc Asta Nielsen collection, as well as their release of the 1913 "Student von Prag" (which has good chances of being my #1 film this round of the listmaking)

[denti alligator]

the 1913 "Student von Prag" (which has good chances of being my #1 film this round of the listmaking)

A great one! I'd love to read your thoughts on it.

[Tommaso]

I need to rewatch it - and also "Sir Arne's Treasure", which was my No.1 the last time around - for a detailed appreciation, but I simply realised in the last few years - not least thanks to the wonderful new restoration - how immensely important the 1913 Der Student von Prag was for establishing cinema as 'art', quoting from or at least aligning itself with motifs from German Romantic literature and being as visually inventive as it is. It's also one of the very first films (actually I can't think of any earlier film at the moment) that had a specific, original score written for it. I'll come back to the film at a later point, but meanwhile I'd definitely suggest to everyone here to watch that wonderful new resto, and dump that awful old US disc which runs much too fast and looks so bad that it doesn't give you any fair impression of the film.

[matrixschmatrix]

The Blue Bird

This was a delight. You could tell it was an adaptation of a play- there's something about the whole enterprise that feels like something that could be revived for a fifth grade class to put on, particularly the number of small speaking parts it crams in- but it nonetheless transcends that, due mostly to absolutely inspired visual effects and, I dunno, mise en scene.

The story itself is very moral lesson/fairytale, an extended allegory about all the places where happiness isn't to be found that seems like it either gets a bit lost in the weeds or chooses to be more complex than simply didactic- happiness, evidently, is not to be found in riches (interestingly divided into a series of luxuries, ranging from the luxury of land ownership to the luxury of fulfilled vanity to the luxury of sleeping too much, and implying that owning wealth is a moral failing akin to glutton) but also not in... night time? And not with the dead, or the not yet living?

In their quest, the children are accompanied by sort of animist spirits of Things, a dog and a cat, but also bread and sugar and water and fire and light- none of which seem to be all that germane to the plot of the thing, but which give it both a sort of pagan/Franciscan sense of caring for all things, a universal love that transcends even concerns over what is actually alive, and a greater sense of a fairy tale world- as well as an excuse for a dancing fire sprite that is particularly beautiful. They all go together to the fairy kingdom (after, in one of several oddly jarring notes, the children are told all their companions will die as a result of the night's adventure, which the cat responds to by briefly and ineffectually trying to sabotage them) where the first stop, the night kingdom, is maybe the best thing in the movie- it reminds me of Cocteau, with extras staying perfectly still in some shots so that they appear as decoration, or dancers covering up all of their bodies except a hand or a part of their face, to appear disembodied. Mother Night is tired, as her children- illness and war (??) and ghosts are all being besieged by increasing enlightenment on humanity's part, and the scene is played mostly with a melancholy that seems borne of this; the children believe they find the happiness they seek, but when they leave the kingdom, all they have found is death.

The children then go to visit their dead grandparents- a scene without a lot of particularly noteworthy content except that it appears, in another jarring note, that they have something like seven dead siblings, including a small baby- where they discover the bird they believe is happiness, but which cannot remain so outside of the happy home it inhabits (though, contradictorily, it is also implied that the dead only continue to exist while the living think of them- and waste away miserably when ignored.) They then travel to the land of unborn children, remarkably largely for a highly creepy romance between two children not yet born- one tells the other, when pulled away, that she will know him in life because he will be the saddest thing on earth- and the aforementioned kingdom of riches, which is mostly the most normally didactic part of the proceedings, a series of luxuries illustrated by the kind of shitty person they engender. Here the spirits that have been accompanying them become tempted, and the children must rush home, where- surprise!- it turns out happiness has resided all along. After some farewells to the spirit friends (which does not seem to resolve whether the dog and cat literally died, but no matter) and resolution of the framing device about giving happiness away to a sick neighbor girl, and then letting it go free, the movie ends, but despite some of the more quotidian elements, the magic of the thing lingers. I cannot imagine that I will be able to watch enough movies from the era that I like enough to displace this one from my top ten, and it's absolutely worth seeking out.

(I think there was also a kingdom of GOOD pleasures- clean air and springtime and love and motherhood and things- but I honestly had already forgotten it, and I watched this movie last night. It's not a standout element.)

(Also, at the end, the children are in rhapsodies that the bird that was in their home all along turns out to be the Blue Bird of Happiness- but it remains resolutely tinted gold, along with everything else. One wonders if it would have been hand-tinted blue in original screenings.)

[knives]

Tourneur's film made my list for the all time and will certainly make it for this list. I don't think it necessarily has depth, though the unvarnished darkness of the film, as you mentioned the dead siblings is quite shocking, makes it unlike nearly any other children's film I can think of. It also has this static tableaux beauty to it that seems to have inspired a lot of later experimentalists like Straub and Huillet.

[matrixschmatrix]

Yeah, I mean it's not a profound movie thematically- though I think one could find some Lynchian depths in the places between real and unreal- but it as times a profoundly realized one, and in era where I'm likely to have a number of movies on my list simply for conveying a narrative effectively and cleanly, I'm not going to keep something off for not being Persona

[matrixschmatrix]

Well, speaking of the profound and the near-profound:

Intolerance

So, possibly I should start by saying that overall, I think Griffith's actual argument in the movie has absolutely nothing on the filmmaking prowess he's using to put it across. The basic idea, intolerance across the ages, is all over the place in what it means by the term- there's a sort of link of religious intolerance between the Babylon and French sections, and Griffith tries to make one about anti-drinking zealots between the Christ and the modern parts, but it never really holds up. It doesn't matter- this is a filmic exercise, and as such, it succeeds incredibly.

Of the four sections, two are so short they seem to exist primarily to give Griffith extra material to intercut with the two primary stories, and in the case of the Christ story, little ironic stingers he can link other images with. The part about the St. Bartholemew's day massacre seems like it would last about 10 minutes if separated out from the rest of the film, and spends more time introducing its various characters than it does in paying any attention to them; does it matter that Monsieur is 'effeminate'? It feels like it could have been any massacre at any time in history, but I suppose this one sticks out as a religious slaughter that happened exclusively amongst white people, and Griffith was pretty obviously seeking one out. Far more important, though, are the Babylonian sequences and the Mother and the Law sequences.

I haven't watched the standalone version of the Mother and the Law, but I'd bet it's pretty good- I'm not generally a fan of Griffith's, but the pure melodramatic frenzy he gets here is pretty effective, and for once it's hard to fault him for his politics. Purely from what we see, the ultimate ugliness of the thing seems to fall on the big industrialist and a cruelly classist society, which hand-in-hand squeeze families out of a livelihood and then punish them for doing what they need to survive without one, or in this case, punish based on their assumptions about what poor people must be doing. As Griffith's sort of special pleading goes, it's pretty effective- particularly given how real and immediate both the nastiness of the reformers and the ugliness of the capitalists were at the time. There's a sense that he's conflating 'reformers' with people like suffragettes at times, and certainly his idea that people became reformers because they were too old and ugly to be loved seems pretty gross, but overall, it's something that didn't really push me to break identification- and the flying climax would likely work well in its own right.

That said- the Babylonian sequence is the big ticket item here, and my God, does it live up to it. It's honestly still astonishing- Griffith keeps topping himself, first with just general shots of the enormous set he's built, then multiplane ones showing people up top looking down at those below, building to a genuinely spectacular and involving battle, decapitations and all- and then, in what is maybe the single most astonishing shot I've seen for this project, the extraordinary crane (tower?) move from the very edge of the city, coming down over a huge, rhythmically moving mass, a wild yet controlled celebration, swooping down and down until we rest upon the King himself. The plot of the thing is odd, particularly in a movie that seems focused on Christianity elsewhere- this is the story that in the Torah is told from the point of view of the slaves, as a society that was oppressive and decadent and needed to be destroyed, which ends in Belshazzar's feast; here, it's both totally sympathetic to the city in general and Belshazzar in particular, and also links the story to the general plot by implying that gods should be tolerant of one another, something that Yahweh is uh, not known for. Odd though it is, the story is quite likable, and Constance Talmadge manages to make herself stand out against all the enormity- for once, we have a Griffith heroine who does things, rather than silently suffering and soaking up all the cruelty of the world. She's scrappily likable, and though the story is tragic, there's a certain satisfaction that she is allowed to die as she lives, independent and as a warrior.

Describing the movie in discrete chunks does it no justice, though- the intercutting makes it far more than the sum of its parts. It helps one bear the length, and the ugliness of a lot of what happens in it- as one becomes overwhelmed by one storyline, Griffith cuts away to another- and the climax, flying from Babylonian orgy to French massacre to train racing car, with a sort of apotheosis in which it seems that the redemptive death of Christ has spared the Boy, is just an astonishing feat of cinema, and I say this as someone who pretty specifically dislikes Griffith in general- it's as much a revelation as watching Battleship Potemkin for the first time, and one gathers that this is not an accident. I watched- and will try to write up- Broken Blossoms, and I've seen (and will not comment on) Birth of a Nation, but to me at least, this is pretty hands down Griffith's masterpiece.

[knives]

Have you seen The Avenging Conscious yet? I haven't, but its reputation is pretty high and sounds like it addresses some of the criticisms you have on him. Sally of the Sawdust, which I like a bit more than its sound remake, also has a much more active heroine.

[knives]

Also before I forget, went through the Chaplin at Keystone set and he remains a mystery to me. I had seen a few of the Keystone films before, but haven't made a terribly concentrated effort to see them as I don't particularly like Chaplin nor the Sennett style of humour. For the most part this set fulfills that reluctance as there is not really a laugh to be had with this being some lowest common denominator stuff though the handful of Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle films are surprisingly lively and almost have laughs. Her screen presence is very charming and witty while he is a lot better as a second banana then as a proper star, but alas they make up a severe minority of the films here with Chaplin typically only having generic louses like Ford Sterling to act off of.

And I suppose that's the thing. These films are more interesting as the evolution of a persona then as films. To an extent it is amazing how quickly the Tramp developed, just on the second film, though that's in look only with the personality going through a number of changes before being ready for Essanay. For instance for much of Between Showers Chaplin is just a lamed (and poor) lothario lacking any trademark behaviors or even character interactions. Just at the ending though there's a moment between Chaplin and the lead lady where he really takes mold. There's that bashful arrogance and weird rocking back and forth thing he does. By the next film though that's gone and he's back to experimentation, usually as some sort of ass. It's also interesting to see just how long the Tramp took to become THE Chaplin character. At first it seems like he fell into the role immediately, but then he bounces into something entirely different with Tango Tangle, which features an amazingly on form Fatty Arbuckle producing some good moments, where he seems like one of those forgettable Universal horror heroes rather then a slapstick comic. This kind of oscillation keeps occurring throughout though the Tramp is the one guise he seems to realize works as it is the only one he regularly goes back to.

Perhaps it is just because of the Keystone method, but the worst parts of the Tramp are the thing that solidify the quickest. Here's the version that Buster Keaton said he was not going to be when he became a solo artist in the next decade. In some of these he can be really unlikable and just plain cruel. I'm not a fan of his sentimental side, but he also developed this middle point of comedic decency which is totally absent from the collection. That really renders some of these films as rather trying especially when he lacks a proper foil. Another point of interest is how many later scenarios have their cinematic birth here (I assume much of them have their origins with his theater act). You can see how a segment here and there later grew into The Rink or One AM. That's probably the most interesting part of this evolution. How these poor films got turned into good and even occasionally great ones.

There's not much of Chaplin the director here and I wonder if that was part of his move to Essanay as, to perhaps be cliche, nobody not even Normand seems to have understood Chaplin's comedic sensibility and ability as well as the man himself. The Normand films are more polished and humourous seeming then the Chaplin ones so I'm not arguing that he was at the time the better artist. Instead I mean that right away with Twenty Minutes of Love the Tramp storyline of romance, sentimentality, and slapstick are present in a form that doesn't change much up through Modern Times. Even more oddball ones like The Face on the Barroom Floor or The Property Man (easily his best film directed by him in the set) is fundamentally told with his quirks in a way that even the closest films not directed by him lack.

[Saturnome]

It's also one of the very first films (actually I can't think of any earlier film at the moment) that had a specific, original score written for it.

It may be for a feature film, but including short films the honor goes to L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1908), featuring a score written for the film by Camille Saint Saëns.

But, if Emile Reynaud's pantomimes for his Theâtre optique are considered films (I believe they are) , then they may be the winner with an original piano score for each of them as soon as 1892 (along with synchronized sound effects and full color).

[zedz]

Ooh, that looks excellent. Is there anything else I might want to pick up for this project from Amazon.de?

Other relevant Filmmuseum editions apart from the ones mentioned (Student of Prague, Four Films by Asta Neilsen, Nerven):
Crazy Cinematographe 1896-1916
Screening the Poor 1888-1914 (yes, that's the correct start date: this collection goes back to magic lantern presentations) - I can't recall anything life-changing on these compilations, but there's a lot of interesting stuff that gives a good idea of general production in the era.
Anders als die Andern - 1919 gay drama
Blind Husbands
Hamlet - Their disc of the 1921 Asta Nielsen version also includes Die Filmprimadonna (1913), which is a fun film.

[jindianajonz]

Some stuff that's on track to make my list, though I'm still pretty early in my viewings:

Addition and Subtraction (Georges Melies, 1900): I'm only though the first disc of Flicker Alley's Melies box, but it's been an enjoyable ride so far. This one stands out to me for being a good exemplar of Melies' favorite tricks of this early era: He starts as a helpless bystander seemingly shocked by the sudden appearance of women as he tries to sit in a succession of chairs, but ends up being the master magician on stage demonstrating his craft in humorous ways. He is quite adept at matching up actors across the edits, and the humor of seeing him mold the women in various ways holds up quite well.

Going to Bed Under Difficulties (Georges Melies, 1900): While the above film is looking like a lock on my list because it is the prototypical Melies of this era, the second film stands out for being quite different from his usual schtick. It borrows a bit from his earlier The Bewitched Inn (1897), but at least that film suggests an explanation in the form of the supernatural: This film is sheer Bunuelian absurdity. It's a rather simple premise that doesn't lean too heavily on spectacle, offering none of the costumes or set pieces that are included in his more fantastic works, but this is a wise choice as any elaboration would only distract from the great visual gag of seeing a variety of cloaks and hats slowly lining the back wall of the set. Available on the aforementioned Flicker Alley Georges Melies box.

The Thieving Hand (J. Stewart Blackton, 1908): The biggest strength of this film is the physical exploits of its star, listed on Wikipedia as Paul Panzer. His left arm really does take on a life of its own, acting in such an erratic way that I occasionally questioned if it was some sort of in-camera trick as opposed to simply being an actor with an astounding control over his limbs. I can't decide if there's some social message to be gleaned from this film about crime inevitably infecting the impoverished, but it doesn't matter: This film works well enough as a piece of visual spectacle. Available on both the Treasures from American Film Archives collection and the Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1994-1941 collection.

The Lily of Belgium (Ladislaw Starewicz, 1915): An impressive display of early stop motion animation, this early Russian propaganda piece depicts a old man offering his granddaughter an allegory of WW1 in the form of a battle between the creatures of their garden. The water effects are quite stunning, and the body movements and acting of the pine cone soldiers prove that Starewicz has a real mastery of his craft. Available on Early Russian Cinema vol 3.

[knives]

Thanks for including the disc sources.

[knives]

The Matrimaniac
The premise to this film is brilliant and almost single handedly raises it above the agreeable charm that it mostly suffers on. Fairbanks decided to elope on a train with Constance Talmadge, in a surprisingly interesting performance for this sort of slapstick romance, but another suitor trails them. The film doesn't take advantage of its train setting nearly enough, but it all the same does manage a few really good gags based on the setting. The big problem, and I suspect that will be the throughline on this whole set, is that Fairbanks is not at all funny.

Wild and Wolly
Again, we've got a great premise, this time about the death of the dream of the west, handled with a smooth intelligence undercut totally by the fact that Fairbanks is to humour what being dead is to a sense of self. Fortunately though the zeppo is sidelined through most of the picture with the world building taking up much more time and effort on the part of the film. The way they deal with his New York rube and the interplay between genre expectation and social reality is just so inherently hilarious that the film is a blast for as long as it doesn't try to be dramatic (which unfortunately isn't the whole film). That the film is even willing to have its genre dialogue involve the concept of romance is the most interesting part of the set so far and I sincerely wish that at least this piece of daring do they could have kept up.

The Poor Little Rich Girl
My introduction to Pickford, have only seen her in bit parts before went along a lot better than the comedies of her UA compatriot. There's a lot of weird going on here and I imagine stuff like Pickford playing a child (are we sure this isn't who Graham Greene was thinking of) plays out badly in other laces, but thanks to Tourneur's masterful direction it works very well as this inbetween of the theater and Perrault. It's so sad in places that it is almost easy to ignore how ridiculous it is to be asked to sympathize with this rich girl who as the film says wants to be poor. This is because despite how awful being poor in the early 20th century was even knowledge of that makes the life as depicted here look heaven sent. Certainly there's no risk of people trying to kill you for your money. Watching this so soon after The Blue Bird really helps to add to the appreciation of Tourneur's technique. Instead of that film's series of tableaux imbuing a moralistic storytelling this earlier film features a true gross of technique with a heavy emphasis on some very interesting editing affects. This gives the story a sense of greater scope despite being so much shorter. The movie even gives a lesson in this with dream sequence intercut with reality showing the differences in storytelling method and effect. This is a really great film which makes me excited for the whole set.

[jindianajonz]

Any reason you skipped over Mystery of the Leaping Fish, Knives?

[knives]

I've seen it already. I like it, it made my list last time, but there's not much to say beyond it being as weird as a Todd Browning written coke comedy should be expected to be.

[matrixschmatrix]

The Matrimaniac
The premise to this film is brilliant and almost single handedly raises it above the agreeable charm that it mostly suffers on. Fairbanks decided to elope on a train with Constance Talmadge, in a surprisingly interesting performance for this sort of slapstick romance, but another suitor trails them. The film doesn't take advantage of its train setting nearly enough, but it all the same does manage a few really good gags based on the setting. The big problem, and I suspect that will be the throughline on this whole set, is that Fairbanks is not at all funny.

I just got the Fairbanks set and started with this one- and the first thing I noticed is that you're dead right that Fairbanks looks older in the teens than he does in the 20s. He's the rare man whose mustache added immensely to his fuckability, I think, but his haircut and suit here do him no favors either. He's only recognizable when he's doing stunts, or when his delighted grin at what a wild situation he's gotten himself into breaks out.

I feel like this is a movie that's almost more frustrating than a bad one, because it almost works- it's so easy to picture, say, Harold Lloyd making a killing with not only the general set up, but nearly all the beats. The frustration of having to haul the minister around is inspired and adds an extra layer to the sort of pathological determination that characterizes Fairbanks (which prefigures a lot of Keaton's best work, too, though it's easier to picture Keaton going through all this to get out of a marriage.) I'm not sure I agree that Fairbanks himself isn't funny, though that's certainly not a defining trait of his, I think his physicality works pretty well for this sort of thing, and the movements of his body are like 90% of his performance; I kind of like his take on this, which is someone who realizes that this is all pretty absurd, and enjoys it. It just, frustratingly, never quite breaks correctly. It reminds me, actually, of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which are likewise action comedies filled with gags that are really excellent ideas, but which the director just can't quite get to come off- you're left finishing the gag in your mind, which leaves a sort of an itchy irritation. Likewise, his opponents and their moves don't quite have the clarity of position and action a setup this straightforward seems to demand- I'm not 100% clear on how you can charge a man with abducting a grown woman who voluntarily went with him, nor on what grounds the injunction to stop the marriage was based (though those may be things that would make more sense to an audience 100 years ago) and I honestly thought the other suitor was her brother until he suggested they elope.

The weirdest joke of the whole thing- the ending- also feels kind of gross; Fairbanks, protecting his newly won bride, locks her in a vault. As Talmadge never seemed quite as dedicated to the whole thing as he was (she just wanders off when he's chased away from a rendezvous by process servers, and one gets the feeling she's mostly in it because it's an adventure) it doesn't really have the vibe of an adoring universe of two- and the underlying justice of seeing her rescued from a controlling father and wet fish suitor is totally undercut by having Fairbanks do the same thing her father did and lock her away. Like, I get that it's a gag, but if you're going to restrict yourself to one surreal gag in the movie, maybe come up with a better one.

[knives]

I think the Lloyd comparison is completely on target. These films are way too reminiscent of Lloyd's best and also his persona which just adds to the frustration.

[matrixschmatrix]

The Poor Little Rich Girl
My introduction to Pickford, have only seen her in bit parts before went along a lot better than the comedies of her UA compatriot. There's a lot of weird going on here and I imagine stuff like Pickford playing a child (are we sure this isn't who Graham Greene was thinking of) plays out badly in other laces, but thanks to Tourneur's masterful direction it works very well as this inbetween of the theater and Perrault. It's so sad in places that it is almost easy to ignore how ridiculous it is to be asked to sympathize with this rich girl who as the film says wants to be poor. This is because despite how awful being poor in the early 20th century was even knowledge of that makes the life as depicted here look heaven sent. Certainly there's no risk of people trying to kill you for your money. Watching this so soon after The Blue Bird really helps to add to the appreciation of Tourneur's technique. Instead of that film's series of tableaux imbuing a moralistic storytelling this earlier film features a true gross of technique with a heavy emphasis on some very interesting editing affects. This gives the story a sense of greater scope despite being so much shorter. The movie even gives a lesson in this with dream sequence intercut with reality showing the differences in storytelling method and effect. This is a really great film which makes me excited for the whole set.

I've just watched this too, and I don't think I've quite settled my reaction down- partly because it's quite a disjointed movie, almost a sort of a series of vignettes in this life than a consistent progress from one state to another- the Poor Little Rich Girl bathes, has a playmate, dresses as a boy, misses her own birthday, etc, and while there's connective tissue, there isn't really any particular feeling of forward progress. It's also intensely strange seeing the 25 year old Pickford playing a 10 year old- I kept wondering how they were faking the height differences, as you could spot the oversized furniture fairly easily, but faking the differential (she was 5'1, and everyone looked at least a foot taller- which would be remarkable for the era) in scenes where everyone's feet were visible seemed harder. More distractingly, though, was the sort of fetishism sense it kept giving me- like, given that the lead was an adult woman, the constant play with clothes, taking them off, switching them, throwing them around, and discussing them, along with the feeling that the servants were sort of implacable, earthy authority figures whose will could not really be guessed gave the whole thing sense that someone was about to be erotically spanked at any moment, which association made me kind of uncomfortable (though obviously it's one that I'm bringing more than the movie was directly supplying.)

In terms of the inherent question of 'why should I feel bad for this rich kid', I thought the movie answered it pretty well, even if the answer comes down to sort of dull received wisdom of the importance of mother love and the nuclear family that wouldn't be out of place in a 90's kids movie- basically, while Pickford has the security that wealth brings, and thus is that far ahead of eg Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms, she has access to none of the power, even over servants and other children; she is effectively institutionalized in her own home, and is generally treated with so little affection or tenderness than one can imagine her developing something like reactive attachment disorder. Pickford is very good at getting this across, and manages to show her character as absolutely desperate for affection without actually making her a little milksop- her little dance, in particular, is just a joy to watch, and brings with it a sense that all she really wants to do is dance and have someone love her.

The final act- when she is, in a harrowingly believable sequence, casually poisoned by a servant who doesn't even have the level of connection required for real malevolence- seems purely Tourneur, and repeats a lot of the motifs from The Blue Bird- the cast of allies, the girls in white, dancing, the association of pastoral with joy and freedom, and the embodiment of weary but attractive death all seem very similar, though here the dream journey is much condensed. One of the intertitles seems to prefigure Frost- "Here in the forest, dark and deep/I offer you eternal sleep" is close enough to Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening that one wonders if Frost was unconsciously remembering it- and the whole thing has poetry to it, and while I think it's less rich than The Blue Bird, Pickford is a stronger guide than we were given there. It also gives power to her character, as ultimately, she chooses to go back to life, which by the film's logic, implies the (somewhat predictable) happy ending, in which they retreat from the life of urban striving to the old family estate, which also appears to be an enormous mansion.

I'm curious to listen to the commentary, but as an intro to Pickford, I imagine I could have done worse.

[knives]

Have you seen Tourneur's Victory? It's list eligible and stars Lon Chaney, but will give you a very different feel for the director. It still works on fairy tale logic, but is done in a more realistic style and story with no dream sequences I can recall. It really highlights his versatility.