"Little Mary" Escapes Childhood

"Sparrows" is much better than it seems to have any right to be. Sentimental melodrama with awkward comedic interludes, heavy-handed Christian proselytizing with a simplistic dichotomy between good and evil, and a 33-going-on-34-years-old star playing a Victorian ideal of a child-woman. Mary Pickford had been playing "Little Mary" for most of her movie career and especially since "The Poor Little Rich Girl" (1917). It was limiting and tiresome, if not a little unsettling, typecasting. (Gaylyn Studlar goes so far as to refer to a cultural pedophilic gaze regarding these roles in the essay "Oh, 'Doll Divine:' Mary Pickford, Masquerade, and the Pedophile Gaze.") Pickford expressed as much by this point. Yet, although she was very much in control of her star image at United Artists, being one of its four founding members, and likely the most famous woman in the world and one of its most powerful, audiences evidently adored the type. She had tried to break away from the "Little Mary" character before, from getting Frances Marion, the scenarist behind "The Poor Little Rich Girl," to direct her in "The Love Light" (1921), to luring Ernst Lubitsch to Hollywood to recast her as a Pola Negri type sexy street dancer in "Rosita" (1923), but the diminutive Pickford kept returning to masquerading as a child. "Sparrows" would be the end of it, though.

How apt then that her final performance in the child-woman role should be located at a so-called "baby farm," trafficking in child labor and exploitation, and encircled within a bottomless swampland and threatened by unsympathetic masters. "Sparrows" is a jailbreak, and "Little Mary" finally made it out this time. It rather reminds me of how fellow United Artists founder Charlie Chaplin celebrated completing his contracts with the Mutual and First National studios by playing an escaped prisoner (see "The Adventurer" (1917) and "The Pilgrim" (1923)). And, you know what, although "Sparrows" was the peak of Pickford's popularity, with her career to soon go sideways with the talkies, her escape was successful. See her next film and final silent, "My Best Girl" (1927). "The girl with the golden curls" finally grew up.

Retrospectively, one may already see this transition having taken place in "Sparrows," of a character who is more of a mother than a fellow to the other enslaved children. Albeit, there's still her head butting an actual juvenile actor, the awful son of the adult kidnappers, played for laughs. Her decidedly adolescent displacement at least provided a supposedly safe outlet in the era for a woman to act in the combative and heroic manner mostly reserved for male protagonists. A woman who by her masquerade as a child is free to transgress and otherwise shift between masculine and feminine archetypes. Hence the bumbling bobby laughing his stupid head off after the climactic escape. And, it's without any of the sex that makes some of these child-woman performances disturbing--not even a romantic interest this time. Mother Mary, the virgin.

Perhaps, the most interesting aspect of the religiosity of the picture is that it allows Mary's Molly a secondary role as storyteller, leading the children in prayer and providing them hopeful promises of God's deliverance. The final scene involves the depiction of such an idealized flashforward. Most striking of all is the death dream scene, where Jesus as a shepherd appears in a vision of Molly's dream projected on a wall, which is reminiscent of such early cinema visions until he steps out of the vision and into Molly's space. Usually this would risk being unbearably hokey, but I think it actually helps to restrain a scene that was ripe for lesser filmmakers to resort to histrionics.

The actual escape--which apparently wasn't dangerous enough with the movie-quicksand-like qualities of the swamp being well established, or kidnappers and a dog chasing after them through it, that alligators had to be added--is a great, action-packed and suspenseful sequence. Granted, Pickford was full of it when she later claimed that she was in danger from the gators during production, the matte work surely done to accomplish the shots are very well done. That's no surprise. Pickford usually had the best cameramen in the business photographing her.

No less than Hal Mohr (a two-time Oscar winner) and Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (both of the seminal "Sunrise" (1927) fame, among otherwise important careers)--all world-class cinematographers--worked on this one. And she had a fine art director in Harry Oliver (who would go on to be nominated for two Oscars for Frank Borzage productions, as well as working on the sets of F.W. Murnau and Howard Hawks). Reportedly, she had a falling out with director William Beaudine, who also did her prior "Little Annie Rooney" (1925) (and whose life story going from Pickford's director to making "Billy the Kid Versus Dracula" (1966) must be interesting), but she enlisted none other than Lubitsch to add an uncredited assist in the editing. So, of course, Pickford's best silents such as this one look magnificent. Furthermore, character actor Gustav von Seyffertitz is a fortunate bit of casting, his menacing presence raising the stakes of the Southern Gothic milieu. The opening business with him dropping the doll to sink in the bumbling mud sets the tone effectively from the start. All the children do well. And, it should go without saying that the woman at the center of drawing such talent was a master of her craft.

I saw the finely-tinted new restoration of 2020 that appeared on Turner Classic Movies for this past inaugural Silent Movie Day. The orchestral score by the Graves Brothers, while rather modern, is very good, as well, and I've heard good things regarding the prior restoration and score that Milestone Video released a few years back. Watch at least a couple of Pickford's prior child-woman pictures, then check this one out--the escape of and from "Little Mary" becomes all the more poignant.