Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/29/19

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

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.