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.

Coquette (Sam Taylor, 1929)

Is Mary Pickford's performance in Coquette the worst ever to win a best actress Oscar? It's certainly a bad performance, full of cute mannerisms and telegraphed emotions, along with a terrible attempt at a Southern accent. At 37, Pickford was about 20 years too old to play the flirtatious young Norma Besant, a fact that becomes especially clear when she sits on the lap of Louise Beavers, who plays her "mammy," the black servant who raised her -- Beavers was ten years younger than Pickford. But this was Pickford's first talkie after 20 years in silent films in which she become the movies' first superstar, and unlike some silent stars, she demonstrates a perfectly fine speaking voice. Still, after three more features that did only passable box office, she took the hint and retired. The main problem with Coquette is not Pickford but the creakiness of the vehicle, which had been a stage hit for Helen Hayes. The melodrama, about a flirtatious girl whose carelessness brings about disaster for both the man she loves (Johnny Mack Brown) and her father (John St. Polis) who objects to their love, is stagebound, largely because of the limitations of early sound technology, but also because screenwriter-director Sam Taylor had not made a sound film before. Pickford appears game throughout, and she's certainly a better actor than Brown or St. Polis, not to mention the callow William Janney, who plays Pickford's younger brother. In one scene Janney wears one of the most eye-offending outfits ever seen on-screen: a plaid sweater tucked into deep-pleated striped pants. My retinas have yet to recover. It's very possible that Pickford's performance stood out against the others that are in Academy records as under consideration (there were no official nominations that year): Ruth Chatterton in Madame X (Lionel Barrymore), Betty Compson in The Barker (George Fitzmaurice), Jeanne Eagels in The Letter (Jean de Limur), Corinne Griffith in The Divine Lady (Frank Lloyd), and Bessie Love in The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont). I've been unable to see the performances by Chatterton and Compson, but my pick so far would be Eagels.

The Love Light (Frances Marion, 1921)

Watching Mary Pickford in The Love Light is exhausting. She is continuously on, rough-and-tumbling with her brothers, gamely sending them off to war, grieving their deaths, rescuing a sailor from drowning, hiding him from the villagers, flirting with him, discovering to her horror that he's a spy and that he may have made her the inadvertent cause of her brother's death, sending him off to the mercy of the villagers and his death. And just when it seems like she can't suffer (or act) any more, she has his baby (they were secretly married), goes mad and sees it adopted by another woman, gets it back, loses it again in a fiendish plot by the other woman, goes mad again, regains her sanity when her childhood boyfriend comes home from the war blinded, teaches him how to cope with his blindness, and eventually rescues her child from the clutches of the other woman by boarding the storm-tossed vessel in which the woman had tried to abduct the baby. It's one of those soaped-up melodramas we think of as typical of silent films, but it works, mostly because Pickford is amazing, but also because Frances Marion was such a skilled director and writer. Marion later became  the first woman to win an Oscar for something other than acting, with her award for writing The Big House (George W. Hill, 1930), though by that time she had given up directing. (As a writer, the IMDb credits her with 188 titles, though some of those are remakes of her earlier films.) Still, it's primarily a showcase for Pickford's special brand of hard, determined acting. She resembles in her determination such later stars as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, though they lacked Pickford's façade of softness (a softness masking steel). Davis would, of course, somewhat cruelly parody Pickford later in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962). One great plus to The Love Light is the fine cinematography of Charles Rosher and Henry Cronjager.