More Mary Pickford—Love Among the Roses (1910), The School
Teacher and the Waif (1912), and A Little Princess (1917).
One of the interesting things to me is the vast difference
in style between the shorts and the feature. You can really tell that the
shorts were just knocked out quickly and the feature was treated with much more
respect. The thin plot of Love Among the Roses is that of a highbrow gentleman
entering into a marriage of convenience. Mary Pickford comes along (she’s a
lace maker) and also enters into a marriage of convenience, with a gardener.
Well, don’t you know, the highbrow gent sees Mary and is smitten, the gardener
sees the highbrow’s wife and is smitten. Highbrow’s wife returns her ring to
her husband, and Mary returns her ring to the gardener. So the two couples get
together with their newly smitten partners and the film ends.
In The School Teacher and the Waif, Mary, the daughter of an
alcoholic farmer, is suddenly forced to attend school. She is woefully
unprepared for socialization with others and is consequently bullied by the
other students. The school teacher provides friendship, and things get better
for a while—until she is made to wear a dunce cap after a spelling bee (she has
no way of knowing what the letters are). Dejected, she becomes a truant, gets
hooked up with a con man who says he’ll marry her, and is eventually rescued by
the teacher, who has gone out on his own to find her, since she had not been in
class. Once again, a bit of a clunky ending.
A Little Princess is based on a book written by Frances
Hodgson Burnett (the book is actually a rewritten version of her earlier
serialized story Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s). Sara (Miss
Pickford) is placed in a boarding school while her wealthy father returns to
India. Capt. Crewe has left instructions (and finances) for Sara to be treated
with only the best, and the headmistress, Miss Minchin, does that, but with
some simmering resentment. Sara gets along well with the other children, after
an initial adjustment period; she is a gifted storyteller, and regales the
other children with a version of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (giving rise to
opulent sets and costumes for use in the film). Then word comes that Capt.
Crewe has died—Sara is suddenly a pauper. Miss Minchin keeps her on at the
school, but as a scullery maid, forced to live in the attic with the slavey
(Miss Burnett’s word, not mine) Becky (winningly played by Zasu Pitts). The two
girls get along very well and have quite a few interesting, and funny, scenes.
A neighbor observes Sara being treated cruelly by Miss Minchin, and he decides
to make her life much more pleasant. As Christmas is approaching, he sets up a
full turkey-with-trimmings dinner for Sara and Becky in their attic rooms. Miss
Minchin finds them enjoying their dinner and proceeds to drag both girls away.
Their benefactor sees this and rushes in, along with his boss, who turns out to
be Capt. Crewe’s best friend. It seems that he and the captain had invested
heavily in a diamond mine, but he had lost track of the captain and,
subsequently, Sara. But the mine has profited greatly, and Sara’s share of her
father’s estate means that she is no longer a pauper. Her new benefactors move
Sara and Becky into their own home, and Sara convinces them to have all of the
children from Miss Minchin’s to share Christmas day with them. Miss Pickford
was quite convincing both as a little rich girl and as a little poor girl.
As always, Ben Model provided excellent piano scores to all
three films, with enough variety between them to keep them interesting while
adding greatly to the mood and to the enjoyment of the silents. There’s one
more afternoon to come in this Mary Pickford series. I hope to be there.
ConcertMeister
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