The Oxford History of World Cinema (26 page)

Mary Pickford (1893-1979)

Born Gladys Louise Smith in Toronto, Canada, in 1893, Pickford and her two siblings

went on the stage at an early age to support their widowed mother. As Mary Pickford,

Gladys made her New York stage début in 1907. Two years later she was hired by the

American Mutoscope and Biograph Company to play a bit part in a D. W. Griffith one-

reeler, Her First Biscuits ( 1909). Her screen presence and well-developed acting talent

ensured her a central place in Griffith's troupe, and under his direction she appeared in

virtually a film a week during 1909 and 1910. Biograph did not credit their actors by

name, for fear that they would become too powerful. However, Pickford became famous

as an innocent and engaging heroine; the 'Biograph Girl with the Curls'.

In late 1910 she left Biograph in search of greater control and a larger salary. After

periods at various companies she settled at Adolph Zukor's Famous Players in 1913. She

was touted in publicity as ' America's Foremost Film Actress'. Her professional stamina

was legendary; she made seven features in 1914, eight in 1915. These films, particularly

Tess of the Storm Country ( Porter, 1914), cemented her screen image and the public's

affection for her, and elevated her to the position of first female screen superstar.

Mary Pickford in Little Annie Rooney ( 1925)

Her Botticelli-esque blonde beauty sent American critics into barely suppressed erotic

rapture. Yet her aura of dainty Victorian delicacy, so often emphasized in still

photographs, was complicated on screen by a quality of independent asexuality. She was

expert at playing the adolescent on the verge of womanhood, the goodnatured tomboy

posing as street tough, and the neglected working-class daughter. The success of these

portrayals depended upon her extraordinary ability to capture natural details of everyday

behaviour and to project an engaging, mischievous energy.

' America's Sweetheart' sold war bonds, gently preached the virtues of female equality,

and scrupulously hid her grown-up failings, including several adulterous affairs. Nothing

could touch her popularity, not even a divorce from her first husband to marry actor

Douglas Fairbanks in 1920. In fact, her marriage to Fairbanks was a publicist's dream

come true, and sealed the popularity of both stars. The couple became the royalty of

Hollywood, reigning from their plantial mansion Pickfair. Their fame was not limited to

America. In 1926 the couple received a rapturous welcome from crowds in Moscow.

Pickford had become 'The World's Sweetheart'.

Pickford's success had much to do with her skills as an astute businesswoman, who

carefully controlled her own image. At her peak, she assembled production teams, chose

her co-stars, wrote scenarios, occasionally directed herself (without credit), or hired

directors who would do what she told them.

In 1917 she began to produce her own Artcraft Pictures for Paramount/Famous

Players-Lasky. She made enormous amounts of money for the studio with films like Poor

Little Rich Girl ( Tourneur, 1917) and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm ( 1917) until she

reputedly told Zukor she could no longer 'afford to work for $10,000 a weak'. The

unprecedented control she had over her career culminated in 1919 with the founding of

United Artists with Fairbanks, Chaplin, and Griffith. This allowed her to oversee the

production and the distribution of her films.However, Pickford did not use her

extraordinary professional freedom to increase the diversity of her roles until it was too

late. UA films like Pollyanna ( 1920) and Little Lord Fauntleroy ( 1921) continued to

portray her as the sweet adolescent. This conservatism was broken only once, in a daring

(for her) collaboration with director Ernst Lubitsch, the costume drama Rosita ( 1923).

The film was a critical and financial success, but Pickford could not break with her

established image and, although now over 30, reverted back to sentimental adolescent girl

roles in Little Annie Rooney ( 1925) and Sparrows ( 1926). The silent film audience never

seemed to tire of this image.However, under the pressure of talkies and changing cultural

mores, she made a decisive transition to adult roles in her first sound film Coquette

( 1929); the film brought her profits and an Oscar, but Pickford's screen persona seemed

increasingly out of step with the modern sexual ideals promulgated by the Jazz Age. She

was, as Alistair Cooke has suggested, the woman every man wanted - for a sister.Pickford

retired from the screen in 1933 after he fourth talkie. The success of Coquette was never

repeated, and her career did not recover from The Taming of the Shrew ( 1929), a

disastrously unpopular talkie in which she had starred with Fairbanks; their first and last

film together. She retreated to the legendary Pickfair and, it is said, to be dubious

consolations of the bottle.Fearful of public ridicule of her adolescent screen persona she

bought the rights to her silent films with the apparent intention of having them destroyed

on her death. Although she later relented, her films are still difficult to see, and this has

contributed to the fixing of her image as the eternal innocent girl.

GAYLYN STUDLAR
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
The Lonely Villa ( 1909); The New

York Hat ( 1913); Tess of the Storm Country ( 1914/1922); The Poor Little Rich Girl

( 1917); Stella Maris ( 1918); Daddy Long Legs ( 1919); Little Lord Fauntleroy ( 1921);

Rosita ( 1923); Little Annie Rooney ( 1925); My Best Girl ( 1927); Coquette ( 1929); The

Taming of the Shrew ( 1929); Secrets ( 1933)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eyman, Scott ( 1990), Mary Pickford: From Here to Hollywood.

Pickford, Mary ( 1955), Sunshine and Shadow.

Douglas Fairbanks (1883-1939)

In the autumn of 1915 a Broadway actor named Douglas Fairbanks made his first

appearance on the screen. Although Triangle Pictures' expectations for him were modest,

Fairbanks's début film, The Lamb ( 1915), was a smash hit. Audiences loved him in the

role of Gerald, a 'mollycoddle' whose genteel, old-money ways were corrected by tapping

his pioneer heritage through proper Western adventure. Soon Fairbanks was starring in

one 'athletic comedy' a month. The standard formula for these was established on his third

film, His Picture in the Papers ( 1916), a clever urban satire penned by scenarist Anita

Loos and directed by John Emerson. These films earned him the nicknames of 'Dr Smile',

'Douggie', and 'Mr Pep'. He was Hollywood's primary cinematic exponent of optimism

and a bouncing, exuberant masculinity that made the world a playground to be scaled,

leapt over, and swung through.It was clear to critics and audiences that Fairbanks was

bringing the same character into every film, but it left few complaining: he was virtually

unrivalled in popularity. During the late 1910s, Fairbanks gained increasing control over

his productions. He moved from Triangle to Artcraft, a prestigious, artist-controlled

division of Paramount. There, he continued his collaboration with Loos and Emerson with

more clever satires of modern American life. Quack psychology, food faddism, the peace

movement, even Rooseveltian nostalgic primitivism, all became fodder for good-

humoured kidding. In one of his most successful pictures of this period. Wild and Woolly

( 1917), Fairbanks plays a childish New York railway heir who is sent out West to

supervise a paternal project. To gain the railway's business, Bitter Creek accommodates

him by turning their modern-day community into an 1880s boom town complete with

Wild West shoot-outs (with blanks) and a 'prairie flower' of a girl.Like his hero Theodore

Roosevelt, Fairbanks became a cultural icon of the 'strenuous life' so touted in American

discourse as the antidote to 'over-civilization', to urban life, and to feminine influence.

Fairbanks, however, drained this masculine ideal of its bellicose quality and substituted a

boyish charm. Audiences found him the perfect balance between Victorian gentility and

modern vitality.In 1919, Fairbanks joined other top box-office draws Charles Chaplin,

wife-to-be Mary Pickford, and director D. W. Griffith in the formation of United Artists.

There he had greater control of his films, and they began to change. He turned from

contemporary comedies to costume dramas like The Mark of Zorro ( 1920), an epic that

played off Fairbanks' penchant for transmutation between masculinities, here between the

effete Spaniard Don Cesar Vega and Zorro, the vigorous masked hereo. Fairbanks

repeatedly turned to stories drawn from literature either written for boys or popular with

them, like Dumas's The Three Musketeers ( 1921) with its youthful romantic hero

D'Artagnan.Fairbanks's artistic independence at UA led to more technically and

aesthetically ambitious films: Robin Hood ( 1922), The Thief of Bagdad ( 1924), and The

Black Pirate ( 1926), which are the epitome of the humorous adventure epic. By the end

of the silent period, however, Fairbanks's exuberance was beginning to wane as he

entered his late forties, and he decisively ended his silent film career with an elegantly

produced swan-song to boyish fantasy, The Iron Mask ( 1929), a film that ends, notably,

with D'Artagnan's death.Like Mary Pickford, Fairbanks had a youthful image that was

linked in the public imagination with the heyday of the silent cinema. Neither of these

great silent stars managed to re-establish their careers after the coming of sound.

Fairbanks starred in a number of unsuccessful talkies before his premature death in 1939.

Douglas Fiarbanks in Raoul Walsh's The Thief of Bagdad ( 1924)

GAYLYN STUDLAR
SELECT FILMOGRAPHY
The Lamb ( 1915); His Picture in the

Papers ( 1916); Wild and Woolly ( 1917); The Mollycoddle ( 1920); The Mark of Zorro

( 1920); The Three Musketeers ( 1921); Robin Hood ( 1922); The Thief of Bagdad

( 1924); Don Q, Son of Zorro ( 1925); The Black Pirate ( 1926); The Iron Mask( 1929);

The Private Life of Don Juan ( 1934)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cooke, Alistair ( 1940), Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character.

Schickel, Richard, and Fairbanks, Douglas Jr. ( 1975), The Fairbanks Album.

The First World War and the Crisis in Europe

WILLIAM URICCHIO

The summer of 1914 witnessed the opening of the Panama Canal, the start of production

on D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, and the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of

Austria. Each of these events, in its own way, would tangibly influence the course of film

history. The canal would stimulate the development of the US shipping industry,

providing the film industry with an infrastructure for greater international distribution.

Griffith's film would contribute to the transformation of film production practices and

distribution techniques, all of which helped the US industry to triumph over its European

competitors. And the Archduke's fate triggered the Great War, realigning the global

political economy and helping to destroy the once internationally prominent film

industries of France, England, and Italy.

The contours of international political, economic, and cultural power emerged from the

war fundamentally transformed. Changes of a magnitude almost unthinkable before the

war appeared on the political front in the form of a republic in Germany, a revolutionary

government in Russia, and women voters in the USA and Britain. The USA grew from a

pre-war parochial and introspective giant, lacking the vision and shipping resources for

world trade, into an assertively international dynamo, armed with ample product and the

means to deliver it. The balance of international political power, banking, trade, and

finance had decisively turned in the USA's favour. The cultural upheaval created by the

war was equally profound. Simply put, the war hurled Europe into the twentieth century.

Social hierarchies, epistemological and ethical systems, and representational conventions

all changed radically between 1914 and 1918. The very concepts of time, space, and

experience, recast by the writings of Einstein and Freud, found something close to

mainstream tolerance in the form of Cubism, Dada, and Expressionism. But just as

significantly, the old, élite cultures of Europe gave way in many sectors to the new mass

culture dominated by the United States.