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.
© James Travers 2016
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Maurice Tourneur film:
The Pride of the Clan (1917)
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.