The NFR Project #59: 'The Poor Little Rich Girl' (1917)

The Poor Little Rich Girl

Dir: Maurice Tourneur

Prod: Adolf Zukor

Scr: Frances Marion, from the play by Eleanor Gates

Phot: Lucien N. Andriot, John van den Broek

Premiere: March 5, 1917

76 min.

It’s difficult now to conjure up a concept of how popular Mary Pickford was. She bore the intimidating title of “America’s Sweetheart” (though born in Toronto) — the on-screen incarnation of an appealing, virtuous, spunky young woman with whom audiences fell in love. Just as Chaplin became world-famous seemingly overnight, so did Pickford after the release of her 1914 Tess of the Storm Country (my NFR essay on it here).

An intelligent and intensely professional filmmaker, she took control of her projects as a producer from 1916 onwards, introducing innovations and raising the bar for film quality across the industry. (Her director for The Poor Little Rich Girl was the top-notch Maurice Tourneur, whose The Wishing Ring we touched on here.) Her successes were so great that she formed United Artists with Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith in 1919 — an effort to get out of under the already heavy hand of the film studios.

As a performer, she had range and depth, working in everything from slapstick to romantic tragedy. As a producer, she exploited her strengths to create a series of wildly successful films in which she played plucky children or pubescents — Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Little Annie Rooney, the Little Princess — in short dresses, adorned with huge sausage curls. She was funny, feisty, and adorable.

The Poor Little Rich Girl is a typical tale of pathos. It is odd to see a vaguely bosomy 25-year-old play an 11-year-old, but the filmmakers cannily used tall actors to play the adults in the film, and scaled the settings and props accordingly, to make her seem as childlike as possible. Here she is Gwen, a coddled but emotionally neglected financier’s child who wants nothing more than to be paid attention to by her parents, or at least out playing roughhouse with the poor kids outside her brownstone mansion’s window.

Her character is high-spirited, which is I believe what we call obnoxious people we like. In one scene, she single-handedly destroys her ornate bathroom, leaping about like a maniacal dwarf. Finally, two of the servants, hoping for a quiet night off to go to the theater (and who can blame them?), give Gwen a double dose of “sleeping medicine,” which propels her into a hallucinatory land of dreams while her parents and her doctor struggle to save her life.

Gwen wanders through the Garden of Lonely Children, encounters Death, and rejects her in favor of Life, who is cavorting symbolically in forest groves in pseudo-Grecian attire a la Isadora Duncan. She sputters back to consciousness, her near-death experience having taught her selfish parents to abandon the pursuit of wealth and social prominence. Hey-ho! They will give up this city livin’ and go dwell in the country. 

The espousal of "country" virtues -- honesty, unpretentiousness, goodwill -- is typical for the time. As millions shirted from rural to urban America, there was an immense backlash of nostalgia for the plain ways of rooted folks. Cities were associated with sin, corruption, and the unholy worship of the Almighty Dollar (in Gwen's drug-dream, her father, "made of money" by being symbolically clothed in it, works relentlessly at a machine that makes more -- capitalism kills the soul). As that way of life was exterminated, it was also celebrated.

This kind of sentiment went over big then, but does not resonate so much now. Periodically, we seem to need a child actor or “child” actor in our lives — witness the later superstardom of Shirley Temple. Pickford created the template for those who followed.

When Pickford got her Honorary Oscar in 1976, she was obvious unwell, struggling to make it through the interview. (It didn't help that she usually had a skinful.) She died three years later at the age of 87.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological order. Next time: Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in Wild and Wooly.

The NFR Project #58: Chaplin's 'The Immigrant'

The Immigrant

Dir: Charles Chaplin

Prod: Henry P. Caulfield, Charles Chaplin, John Jasper (all uncred.)

Scr: Charles Chaplin (Vincent Bryan, Maverick Terrell, uncred.)

Phot: Roland Totheroh, George C. ‘Duke’ Zalibra (William C. Foster, uncred.)

Premiere: June 18, 1917

25:09

The Immigrant is a rare example of a perfect film. Chaplin was a genius, but he also shot 90 reels of film — 15 hours — to get those 25 classic minutes of The Immigrant. He didn’t follow a more traditional, cost-effective set of operational parameters. He didn’t storyboard, he didn’t budget. He did it by doing it, until he got it right.

Fortunately, he could afford to do so as he was at that time the most popular person in the world, and perhaps that the world will ever see. He became an international superstar in 1915, only a year after his first film appearance. As soon as possible, he began writing, starring in, and directing his own projects. His impeccable timing, his subversive wit, his cocky insecurity, his playful inventiveness, his endearing incarnation of the Little Tramp persona were all in service of a comedy that transcended language, perfectly understandable in all cultures by virtue of being entirely human. Chaplin makes sense all over the world because he deals in universal truths.

Here, the Little Tramp is in yet another outcast incarnation — that of the despised, frightened, and powerless immigrant. In an America swarming with new citizens, including Chaplin himself, the fears played upon in The Immigrant are connected to deep feeling, which creates more resonance, more laughs, and ages well. The film opens with a boatload of the tempest-tossed arriving in New York harbor. Chaplin riffs through a set of seasickness gags. He begins to heave in sync with Albert Austin, one of his repertory company, and the camera cuts away just as it seems the two are past the point of no restraint.

Chaplin builds a wistful romantic relationship with fellow traveler, the beautiful Edna Purviance. He aids her after her mother’s “poke” containing their savings is stolen. Charlie inadvertently wins their money from the thief, then gives her the lion’s share of the proceeds. That Chaplin can move instantly from slapstick to pathos and back again is a gift that is increasingly impressive as the years pass. No other film comedian has come close to it.

Some see The Immigrant as bearing the kernel of Chaplin’s left-wing political consciousness, which later caused him to be expelled from the United States, in 1952. In the film, he gives an officious bully of an immigration officer a kick in the behind (cited later as the part of the evidence for his expulsion). But the Tramp character is no respecter of persons, always ready to land a hearty kick on those he dislikes. (In fairness, the same officer gets to give the Tramp a kick in return shortly after.)

The film shifts to “Later — hungry and broke” as the Tramp waddles disconsolately down a city street. He finds a coin on the sidewalk, pockets it, and eagerly enters a restaurant, forgetting that his pocket has a hole. The remainder of the film builds masterfully on the premise of the poor man discovering his fiscal shortfall and trying to remedy it before his burly, aggressive waiter (another Chaplin regular, the enormous and beetle-browed Eric Campbell) beats the tar out of him.

Chaplin entwines his sequence with the first by bringing Edna into the picture, revealing her there dining as well. By film’s end, Charlie has paid the bill and found work for himself and Edna as artists’ models. In a short coda, the Tramp playfully wrestles Edna into a minister’s office. The End.

Chaplin came up with a smooth, integrated plot with characters we could invest in emotionally. This was years beyond contemporary comedians, who just strung gags together. Brownlow and Gill’s magnificent Unknown Chaplin shows that the restaurant sequence was the first to be shot, and that the romantic relationship, the artist’s involvement, and the marriage coda were worked and reworked into satisfying shape. In show business, it takes a lot of work to look effortless. Genius is in large part persistence.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological order. Next time: Mary Pickford in The Poor Little Rich Girl.

The NFR Project #56: Where Are My Children? (1916)

Where Are My Children?

Dir: Phillips Smalley, Lois Weber (both uncred.)

Prod: Phillips Smalley, Lois Weber

Scr: Lucy Payton and Franklin Hall

Phot: Stephen S. Norton, Allen G. Siegler (both uncred.)

Premiere: April 16, 1916

62 min.

She was the first American woman to direct a feature film, and the first to establish and run her own studio. She invented the split screen. She made hard-hitting moral dramas that were wildly popular in her time. She saw film as a persuasive medium through which she could evangelize her progressive Christian beliefs. Lois Weber is a rediscovered filmmaker, disregarded until critical reappraisal in recent decades. (I am unable to find and review her 1916 drama Shoes, which is also on the National Film Registry.)

She entered the business as a singer, performing for the chronophone, the first synchronized-sound playback system. Soon, in creative partnership with her husband, Phillips Smalley, she was making films in the “social problem” vein that were so popular in the 1910s (see my earlier essays on The Cry of the Children and Traffic in Souls). She wrote, directed, and edited her own fair-minded, naturalistic, and nuanced features, made money, and prospered for a time.

 Where Are My Children? made Weber’s reputation, being Universal’s top-grossing film for 1916. Its topic, abortion, caused it to be banned in Pennsylvania. It stars Tyrone Power Sr. as a district attorney who prosecutes an abortionist, only to find that his wife and her “society” friends are all the doctor’s patrons.

This being 1916, Where Are My Children? is not a call for female sexual autonomy but a cry for responsible maternal fulfillment. It is pro-birth control, but anti-abortion. Its working title was The Illborn, and it opens with a schematic of baby souls, suspended in heavenly light and smoke, waiting to come down to Earth. It seems that there are “chance” babies, unwanted babies, and prayed-for babies, and we should all be shooting for Category Three. Unwanted children suffer in health, lack of resources, and exposure to dysfunction and violence. In short, they are a burden on the body politic.

The D.A. and his wife, though affluent, are listless and unfulfilled as they are childless. Everyone around them has adorable little children. The D.A.’s sister brings in her newborn, and we are advised that she has “contracted a eugenic marriage.” The theory of the time was that if potential mates were screened and eliminated from conjugal consideration for displaying deviant characteristics, wholesome and creditable offspring would result. “If the mystery of birth were understood, crime would be wiped out,” an intertitle states. A kind of home-grown breeding program. (This thinking led to marriage restrictions, compulsory sterilizations, and eventually Nazi genocide.)

As the D.A. mopes about, his pampered wife is busy surreptitiously referring her friends to the ominously named Dr. Malfit. (The depiction of the debilitating effects of the procedure as then practiced is not stinted.) “Never dreaming that it was her fault, her husband concealed his disappointment,” says the intertitle. The wife is not only letting own the human race, she’s letting down her husband and herself as a woman. The argument for birth control is independence inverted — it is women kept more at heel.

The plot turns on the seduction of the maid’s daughter by the wife’s brother (a cad and an obvious seducer — “Practice teaches men of this class the bold methods that sweep inexperienced girls off their feet”). Of course, she gets knocked up. Of course, the wife sends her to Malfit, who screws up. She returns, confesses, dies. The D.A. prosecutes the abortionist, who gets 15 years hard labor. Vengefully, he hurls his appointment book at the D.A., who opens it and finds his wife’s name, and those of many of her friends, inside.

Tyrone Power Sr. is effective here in one of his few preserved silent film performances. His commanding and stern visage in the revelation scene gives the movie a powerful melodramatic edge. “Where are my children?” he cries to his wife, who collapses. Unfortunately, “. . . having perverted Nature so often, she found herself physically unable to wear the diadem of motherhood.” We are left with a scene of the two of them, sitting in misery, surrounded by their playful, flitting superimposed imaginary offspring. He shoots her a dirty look. End.

By 1922, moralizing stories were no longer popular, and Weber’s work was deemed too preachy and straitlaced. The movie industry was consolidating, and independents found themselves squeezed out. Weber, and other key early female directors such as Alice Guy-Blache and Nell Shipman, lost their production companies. Weber’s prowess and independent spirit led to her rapid engagement with most of the film companies on the West Coast, but she was unsatisfied. In 1927, she advised young women not to seek a career in the movie industry.

The NFR Project is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry, in chronological order. Next time: Chaplin’s The Immigrant.