Mary Pickford - Parte 5: O FIM DO MUDO

After Fauntleroy Mary did a stunning remake of her 1914 hit Tess of the Storm Country (1922). The year after that she imported German director Ernst Lubitch, and gave him his first chance to direct an American film, Rosita (1923). Working her way through adult roles, she tried her hand at the Elizabethan epic Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall (1924). But fan mail revealed that her public preferred the girl-child roles, and she returned to that mold with Little Annie Rooney in 1925.

Little Annie Rooney is classic Pickford in the best sense of the word. Mary plays a scruffy teenager whose eventual maturation is hastened by the loss of her beloved father. Most of the first part of the story is a long series of tenement gags, and the film’s one fault is that the ethnic stereotypes presented, while good-humored, don’t hold up very well in an era of politically correct sociology.

Sparrows (1926) is a unique film in Pickford’s catalog; an unusual and beguiling film by any measure. In theme it mixes elements of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe. The plot revolves around Mary as “Molly,” a teenager who lives on a “baby farm,” where impoverished parents send their children to work for food and board. The dramatic center of the film is an extended escape sequence, in which the children are threatened by a cadaverous Mr. Grimes and his vicious over- sized dog on the one hand, and swamp-dwelling alligators on the other. Biographer Eileen Whitfield says Sparrows is “horrifically good - a bad dream that wakens to a happy ending; a fairy tale told with brilliant style; a comedy; a Grand Guignol; (and) an expressionist thriller (all rolled into one).”

In early 1927 Mary joined other film professionals as one of the founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Later in October of that year, she released what would prove her last silent film. My Best Girl is a delightful romantic comedy. Mary sought to break with the image that The Poor Little Rich Girl had set, and here she succeeds magnificently. She plays “Maggie Johnson,” a modern woman, her long curls tightly rolled up and hidden from view. Another successful woman writer, Hope Loring, provided the simple shop- girl-meets-boss’-son-in-disguise romance. Loring had recently scripted William Wellman’s Wings, and she thought the young male lead of that movie might be just the thing opposite Mary in My Best Girl. Hope engineered a “cute meet” for the pair, leading Charles “Buddy” Rogers to the front door of Mary’s studio bungalow, without telling him whose door it was. Rogers was smitten at first sight. So was Mary. There is no question that Douglas Fairbanks was the love of her life. Doug and Mary knew how to have fun together and they genuinely loved their better selves. For a long time the marriage worked well. But there were lingering problems. Doug’s genial good cheer could be obscured by long black moods, severe depression. There were rumors of brief affairs. Meanwhile, Mary was weakened slowly over the years by the same affliction that haunted all the members of the Pickford clan: alcohol.

In March, 1928 Charlotte Hennessey Smith Pickford died. Mary was inconsolable. She screamed, she cried, she hit people. Three months later Pickford walked into a hair salon and cut off her curls. Before the end of the year, another death was widely predicted, the art of pantomime. Silent film, an art form forty-five years in development, was doomed. No film starring Mary Pickford was released in 1928, the first such gap since Mary had entered the movies.