The Pride of the Clan (1917)
Directed by Maurice Tourneur

Film Review

The Pride of the Clan was an obvious vehicle to showcase the talents of one of cinema's first superstars, Mary Pickford.  Whilst the film hardly  rates as her most memorable (it is somewhat dated by its formulaic plot and stock characters), Pickford's strikingly naturalistic performance gives it considerable dramatic power and poignancy - as well as a badly needed smattering of humour.  The sequence in which the diminutive Pickford drives reluctant churchgoers into their 'kirk' with a whip is the film's one digression into farce.  Weak and predictable as the story is, the film is redeemed by some artful direction by Maurice Tourneur, one of the great pioneers of early American cinema - he subsequently worked with Pickford on one of her better known films, The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917).

Although this was early into his filmmaking career, Tourneur had already garnered considerable esteem within the film industry.  Yet, despite his enormous contribution to American cinema in the 1910s and 20s (and subsequent impact on early sound cinema in France), his name seems to have faded from memory whilst Pickford's has endured.  The Pride of the Clan is one of several films that Tourneur made for Adolph Zukor's Artcraft Pictures Corporation (part of Famous Players-Lasky), the company to which Pickford was under contract at the time.  In the film, Pickford's love interest is played by her real-life brother-in-law, Matt Moore, with whom she later starred in Coquette (1929).  Another major star of the silent era, Leatrice Joy, appears fleetingly in the film in an uncredited role.

Tourneur's remarkable visual flair (which owes something to D.W. Griffith) is evident throughout The Pride of the Clan, which makes up for its routine storyline with some astonishingly beautiful picture compositions.  The rugged coastal landscape (so convincingly that of a remote Scottish island) is very much a key player in the drama, in a similar vein to what we find in some contemporaneous films from the great Scandinavian film directors, in particular Victor Sjöström - A Man There Was (1917), The Lass from the Stormy Croft (1917).  D.W. Griffith's pioneering use of aggressive cross-cutting is imitated in the film's dramatic climax as the heroine gets herself into a classic Perils of Pauline situation.

The only break from the film's granite realism that Tourneur allows himself is a single, strikingly expressionistic shot of the two principals silhouetted against an eerily misty seascape, the diffuse glow of the moon hanging between them in the distance, like a ghostly lantern.  Tourneur employed silhouettes to stunning effect in many of his early films - notably The Blue Bird (1918) - this was one of a range of expressionistic techniques that he would develop for his early crime films of the 1930s, originating what we now know as film noir.  Like so much of Maurice Tourneur's work, The Pride of the Clan is a seductive cinematic gem waiting to be rediscovered.

Film Synopsis

The fisherfolk of Killean, a small island off the Scottish coast, lead a primitive but contented life, ruled by their clan chieftain, MacTavish.  One day, the fishing boats are caught in a sudden storm and MacTavish is one of the unhappy few to perish.  His resilient daughter Marget takes his place in the closeknit community and asserts her authority by driving reluctant parishioners to church with a whip.  Marget may be tough but she is also as sweet and tender as any girl of her age, and she is barely into womanhood when she loses her heart to Jamie Campbell, a handsome young Scot who feels ill at ease in his community - and for good reason.  Jamie is in truth the son of a pair of aristocrats and was, unbeknown to them, brought up on the island to become a simple fisherman.  When Jamie's parents discover his existence, they insist that he moves to London to get an education and a career worthy of his lineage.  Unable to stand between the man she loves and his future prospects,  Marget is forced to give up her beloved Jamie...