Window Shopping

Mary Pickford's last silent film and arguably her best, "My Best Girl" not only represents the end of the silent era for one of Hollywood's founding stars, but also a decisive break from her child-woman "Little Mary" type that made her the most famous woman in the world. Moreover, it's remarkable how much the film resembles the constantly recycled modern rom-com genre, but back when such a formula was still emerging and fresh to allow for an intelligible commentary on the commercialization of cinematic romance. All of which is heightened by a comedy that's consistently funny and often reflexively so and a romance that may've reflected the real budding one between Pickford and co-star Buddy Rogers, who would also become her third husband (although not for another decade, and she was still married to Douglas Fairbanks at the time).

Regardless, Pickford, escaping the adolescent typecasting finally in her prior "Sparrows" (1926), here negotiated a transition to maturing as a character of the era's so-called "new woman," a working-class female who supports her family by stocking a five-and-dime store, but decidedly not of the flapper or vamp type. Pickford's climactic deconstruction of the artifice of such man-eater tropes is quite amusing and brilliant. Red-hot jazz mama she's not. It may be telling, too, that the actor her Maggie references when pretending her quarreling family is rehearsing for a drama club is Lon Chaney, who was known for his remarkable physical transformations. Likewise, in transitioning from the Victorian child-woman to the modern new woman, Pickford was demonstrating her own versatility.

Neither is "My Best Girl" some dated sentimental diatribe on the supposed ills of the city, women in the workforce, or mass culture. This is not Lois Weber's "Shoes" (1916), where the woman supporting her family by working as a shop girl becomes just a gateway to prostitution. Even when a woman gets her clothes caught in a cab and is dragged into the street in front of an oncoming trolley, it's played for laughs, and the trolley actually stops. If anything, it's a light and overly-rosy celebration of such modernity as a "Cinderella" type cross-class romance. In a gender reversal of Cinderella, though, it's the prince to the five-and-dime dynasty who works under an alias in the store's stock room--nominally to appreciate his father's business from the ground floor before announcing his engagement to a socialite. Being 1927 and despite Pickford in reality being her own boss, this supposedly-regular Joe quickly becomes Maggie's boss despite her having more experience and serving a longer tenure at the store, thus restoring the patriarchal schema of the Cinderella story, which is further reflected in the resolution of Maggie's family situation by the father taking his place at the head of the household (which may be interpreted as a play on Pickford's real-life narrative of supporting a fatherless household by playing the child-woman, who was often, as in "Sparrows," also ironically a mother figure, into her early 30s). The initial reversal does, however, result in most of the romance taking place in, and of the romanticizing thereof, working-class environs, of distributing and consuming mass culture.

Jeffrey Knapp discusses this aspect of "My Best Girl" in the essay "'Throw That Junk!' The Art of the Movie in Citizen Kane" (and I thought I made some odd comparisons to "Citizen Kane" (1941) (e.g. see here and here)), where social mobility is linked with commercial mobility. We get this from the get-go with the meet-cute between Maggie and Joe, including probably the most sexually-suggestive bit of business in the production as Maggie, initially confusing Joe for a customer, inflates some of the shop's toys for demonstration by blowing air into them through her mouth. Indeed, she's no longer Little Mary. Knapp's analysis largely focuses, though, on scenes such as when Maggie intentionally and successively drops her possessions off of a driving-away truck so as to make Joe chase after her in retrieving the items and the scene in the stock room where the couple pretend the box they're sitting in is a classy restaurant. Both scenes involve the imaginative rearrangement of the detritus of mass consumption to turn places of service-industry work into settings for romantic play. "Lovers as artists," as Knapp says. Even when they finally dine at Joe's family's mansion, the play acting continues. Has ever such a more elegant love letter to consumer culture and, more specifically, the work behind it been made?

Ultimately, I think Knapp's point regarding the reflexivity of the mass cultural appeal and distribution of cinematic art (including its mass popularity first arising from the theatrical equivalent of the five-and-dime stores, the nickelodeons) in these two films is best exemplified in "My Best Girl" by the sequence involving the furniture shop window, which is rather the equivalent of the mise-en-abyme of the newsreel film-within-the-film of "Citizen Kane." As with the box in the stock room, but instead of its peephole Kinetoscope-like effect, the shop window provides a frame within the frame of the film itself, looking through a transparent glass like the lens of the cinematographic apparatus, more akin to theatrical projection. Furthermore, Maggie and Joe, standing in for the film's assumed working-class audience, romantically gaze upon the furniture display advertising, "you supply the girl, and we'll furnish the rest." And, on top of this, there's an even lower-class homeless man resting in the corner outside the display who, like the real audience of the film, is gazing upon Maggie and Joe gazing upon this window within the window that is the film. The display also serves as the focal point between the theatrics of a courtroom scene and of what would become a rom-com cliché of the boy chasing after the girl--and in the rain, no less. In short, it's a remarkable sequence. And, as usual of Pickford productions, a team of talented artists deserve credit here, including cinematographer Charles Rosher (who reportedly created the "Rosher Kino Portrait Lens" specifically for Pickford's soft-focus close-ups here) and art director John DuCasse Schulze (creating those working-class and mass-culture spaces to be rearranged by the characters).

In addition to the consumerism as romance and catching cold from being drenched with rain as also somehow romantic and what would become standard plot devices of the meet-cute and the mistaken identity that causes the break-up before the inevitable getting back together, there's also a race against time to get to the happily-ever-after destination. Nowadays, this would probably involve a grand romantic gesture and tedious confessional of one character (usually the man) racing to catch the other before they depart for something else--a trope I believe was largely invented in the climax of Harold Lloyd's "Girl Shy" (1924, and sharing a director and writer with this film), to be repeated in "The Graduate" (1967), "Manhattan" (1979) and "When Harry Met Sally" (1989)--and the rom-com was born.

If someone wants to write off Pickford and her oeuvre as old-fashioned, they should see this counterargument first, of "My Best Girl." The tragedy is that just when Pickford and company, as with other silent filmmakers, had perfected this art for the masses, the talkies blew it up. It's a shame Pickford won her Oscar for her first talkie, "Coquette" (1929), a truly dreadful film and performance. If only she'd cared to campaign for an Oscar in anticipation of the first Academy Awards instead of pioneering such a tactic the second go-around, she likely would've received the honor for the performance she deserved it for in "My Best Girl."