The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1925)

The Freshman (Fred C. Newmeyer, Sam Taylor, 1925)

Cast: Harold Lloyd, Jobyna Ralston, Brooks Benedict, James H. Anderson, Hazel Keener, Joseph Harrington, Pat Harmon. Screenplay: Sam Taylor, Ted Wilde, John Gray, Tim Whelan; titles: Thomas J. Gray. Cinematography: Walter Lundin. Art direction: Liell K. Vedder. Film editing: Allen McNeil.

Wouldn't it be great if all silent films could be as lovingly restored as Harold Lloyd's The Freshman has been? Though not as excitingly hilarious as his Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923), this is probably Lloyd's most polished feature, a good-natured take on the mythos of American college football. It was made in an era when the word "college" meant raccoon coats and hip flasks at places like "Tate University -- a large football stadium, with a college attached," as the intertitle sardonically puts it. The era came to an end with World War II and the consequent GI Bill, which democratized higher education -- and also turned college football into the pseudo-professional sport that it is today. This was an era in which the myth of the gridiron hero could still inspire a schlub like Lloyd's Harold Lamb, infatuated with the idea of becoming a big man on campus. Tellingly, it's a movie that gives Lamb the idea and the mannerisms he naively takes with him as he matriculates at Tate. The Freshman is essentially a send-up of the movie-made myth, cheerfully furthering the myth with Lamb's own unlikely heroism.

Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002)

Frida (Julie Taymor, 2002)

Cast: Salma Hayek, Alfred Molina, Mia Maestro, Diego Luna, Valeria Golino, Roger Rees, Ashley Judd, Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton, Geoffrey Rush. Screenplay: Clancy Sigal, Diane Lake, Gregory Nava, Anna Thomas, based on a book by Hayden Herrera. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: Felipe Fernández del Paso. Film editing: Françoise Bonnot. Music: Elliot Goldenthal.

I usually don't like biopics, with their lurches back and forth between trauma and triumph and their subordination of fact to drama. But I admired Julie Taymor's attempt to integrate Frida Kahlo's life with her work, or really to interpret the latter through the former. I think Taymor falls into the inevitable trap of spending more time on her subject's love life than on her actual work, but Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina are so skillful in displaying the passion and volatility of the film's versions of Frida and Diego Rivera that I can forgive the emphasis on that relationship. Taymor and the screenwriters are less successful in integrating the political aspect of their lives, with its culmination in Frida's affair with Trotsky, played a little remotely by Geoffrey Rush. But the film thrives on its visuals, integrating Frida's paintings with her life, and by the evocative use of color to denote the emotional states of its subject. The trolley accident that marked Frida's life is superbly staged and edited, followed by a brilliant use of Day of the Dead images to suggest Frida's delirium as she undergoes treatment. Frida's greatest success is that it will be hard for me to look at her paintings again without summoning up memories of the film.

Little Annie Rooney (William Beaudine, 1925)

Little Annie Rooney (William Beaudine, 1925)

Cast: Mary Pickford, William Haines, Walter James, Gordon Griffith, Carlo Schipa, Spec O'Donnell, Hugh Fay, Viola Vale, Joe Butterworth, Oscar Rudolph, Francis X. Bushman Jr., Charles K. French, Eugene Jackson. Screenplay: Mary Pickford, Hope Loring, Louis D. Lighton; titles: Tom McNamara. Cinematography: Hal Mohr, Charles Rosher. Art direction: John DuCasse Schulze, Paul Youngblood. Film editing: Harold McLernon.

To our eyes, there's something grotesque about a 33-year-old movie star pretending to be a hoydenish 12-year-old girl. But then there's also something grotesque about a 50-year-old diva playing Octavian or Cherubino. Operagoers accept the one, so why can't we accept the other? Moviegoers of the 1920s certainly did -- in fact, they demanded it of Mary Pickford, rejecting attempts in which she tried to play roles her own age. Pickford was exceptionally small, just a fraction over 5 feet, which helps her carry off the scenes in which she's performing with actual boys, though it's worth noticing that there are no other "girls" in these battling gangs, probably because putting Pickford up next to real girls would draw our attention to the maturity of her face. We become aware of that maturity most when we see her with other adults in the film, like 6-foot-tall William Haines, when only the costuming and her diminutive stature work to maintain the illusion. Still, Little Annie Rooney was near the end of Pickford's turns as a little waif. Four years later she would almost act her age in Coquette (Sam Taylor, 1929) and win a not particularly well-deserved Oscar for it, then follow up with some grownup roles, including Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew (Sam Taylor, 1929), in films that flopped and precipitated her retirement. Little Annie Rooney was cooked up by Pickford herself almost as a conscious farewell to the little girl in curls. You have to get yourself in the frame of mind of the original audiences to appreciate how good Pickford is in this hodgepodge of slapstick action and tearjerking family drama, but she really was a formidable actress.