The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917)
Directed by Maurice Tourneur

Film Review

Mary Pickford was a major international film star by the time she lent her formidable talents to The Poor Little Rich Girl, one of a number of films she made whilst under contract with producer Adolph Zukor at Artcraft Pictures Corporation (part of Famous Players-Lasky, later renamed Paramount Pictures).  A few previous films featuring the now 24-year-old actress had not been as popular as hoped so the fact that The Poor Little Rich Girl was a huge commercial success provided a timely boost to Pickford's career.  Significantly, it was the first of her films in which the adult Pickford played a young girl (a ten year old) as opposed to an adolescent or precocious young woman.  The new image of the actress as 'the girl with the golden curls' was one that would stick to Pickford for the rest of her career, and it is a testament to her acting skill that a woman in her mid-to-late twenties should convincingly get away with playing a pre-teen.

The film was directed by Maurice Tourneur, who had left France in 1914 to work for the American branch of the Éclair film company and went on to have a phenomenal impact on American cinema in its early years.  Tourneur and Pickford had already worked together - notably on The Pride of the Clan (1917) - and whilst they had a strained working relationship (Tourneur hated Pickford's habit of improvisation), there was always a strong mutual respect.  The wilder comedy excesses in The Poor Little Rich Girl are down to Pickford, who saw the film very differently to its director.  As a result, the film has an interesting dual identity - part serious social satire with a cogent moral, part boisterous farce in the Mack Sennett line.

Thematically, the film resembles Tourneur's later film, The Blue Bird (1918) - they both have children as the main protagonist(s) and they have a similar conclusion as to where true happiness is to be found in life.  Whereas The Blue Bird is constructed as a classic fairytale, complete with weirdly expressionistic set designs and dazzling special effects, The Poor Little Rich Girl offers a similar fable in a modern (1910s) context.  The solitariness and smallness of the heroine is emphasised by the use of oversized sets and tall actors (made to stand on boxes in some shots to increase their apparent height).  Camera angles and lighting effects add to the illusion and we have a foretaste of the subjective style that Tourneur would later develop in a series of crime dramas that he made in France in the early 1930s (notably Justin de Marseille) - a style that we now recognise as film noir.

Tourneur's penchant for the weird and fantastic - evident in such films as Figures de cire (1912) and La Main du diable (1943) - reveals itself in a few surreal flights of fancy.  The heroine's over-active imagination causes her to visualise literally turns of phrase that a child of her age would not understand.  So when her governess is referred to as a 'snake in the grass', this is how we see her - a horrifying hybrid snake-like creature.  When she hears that her father is up against 'bears on Wall Street', little Gwen naturally imagines him being attacked by a marauding gang of giant teddy bears.  Tourneur's visual flair is most apparent in the hauntingly expressionistic nightmare fantasy towards the end of the film, which eerily echoes the plot of The Blue Bird as the heroine explores a sinister dreamscape in search of happiness, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.  The Poor Little Rich Girl is one of Maurice Tourneur's stranger films - a straightforward morality play that is repeatedly pepped up by Pickford's wild sense of fun and her director's love of the macabre.

Film Synopsis

10-year-old Gwendolyn is miserable beyond belief, despite the fact that her parents are filthy rich and she lives in a palatial mansion waited on night and day by an army of servants.  Whilst her father is out all day making even more money on the stock exchange, her mother spends all of her time carving out a place for herself in society.  Left all alone with her toys and her frightening governess, Gwendolyn detests being rich and creates mischief by getting mixed up with organ grinders and street boys.  On her eleventh birthday, she is sent to bed early whilst her parents host a party in her honour.  Her maid accidentally gives her an overdose of medicine and she drifts away to an imaginary dreamland inhabited by lonely children.  Realising that their daughter may be dying, Gwendolyn's parents finally realise the error of their ways...