MaryPickford was the first film star and the most powerful woman in Hollywood by1920, yet by 1930 her reputation was already fading from changing fashion andthe coming of sound. Afterward, Pickford was under appreciated by filmhistorians and mocked as a golden-curled melodrama queen by critics who neversaw her movies--a problem she helped cause by withdrawing her surviving filmsfrom circulation. A reassessment in recent decades has restored her reputation,at least among film scholars.
Thehandsome coffee table book Mary Pickford Queen of the Movies (University Pressof Kentucky) is another chapter in her renewal. Along with many black-and-whitestills and photographs and color reproductions of movie posters are a set ofessays that explore the meaning of her remarkable career.
Pickford’sprofessional life began on stage at age six in shabby touring troups; shefound her way to supporting roles on Broadway but sensed the potential of theflickering, primitive medium of film. In 1909 she auditioned for D.W. Griffithat the Biograph Studio in New York and went to work making several short movieseach month.
America,and soon the whole world, fell in love with her face. Mobs of fans turned upwherever she appeared; her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks attracted theattention Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt enjoy nowadays. And she wasn’t just apretty face. From early on, Pickford developed definite ideas about her moviesand was more alert to the possibilities of the new medium than some of herdirectors. She signed production deals, gained approval over her pictures andin 1919 co-founded United Artists to distribute films by independent producers.Pickford was a commanding force onscreen and behind the camera. And then, ascritic Molly Haskell writes in her introduction, “The Victorian ideal ofchild-like innocence an can-do spirit that Pickford brought to luminousperfection crashed on the shoals of a more cynical age.”
Butwhile “child-like innocence" describes her image, even a cursoryexamination of her filmography reveals considerably more scope than shecredited with by earlier film historians. She played American Indian, Mexican,Filipino and Japanese roles. “In appearance alone, she ranges from the winsomelybeautiful to the almost unrecognizably, even grotesquely, plain,” Haskell adds.She played adults, teenagers, children—even a boy in Little Lord Fauntleroy.Although largely deprived of childhood, Pickford was able to enter the body andconsciousness of children with remarkable insight.
Editedby Christel Schmidt, the essays in Queen of the Movies examine Pickford frommany angles, including her drive to success, her characteristic fountain ofcurly hair and her status a century ago as “America’s Sweetheart.” Audiencesfound her radiant and magnetic, an embodiment of the era’s feminine ideals.When those ideas changed, she retired in 1933 rather than linger on as ahasbeen. She was only 40.
