![]() The resulting films produced during the company’s formative years (1919-1931) saw increased emphasis and innovation in regard to stardom, spectacle, show, and salability, features which ultimately innovated the model for the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. Without the benefit of block booking practices through studio-owned theater houses, each founding artist established specific economic and aesthetic practices within their respective oeuvres in order to maintain company solvency. Griffith, and Mary Pickford jointly formed in 1919 to maintain creative autonomy over their work. United Artists was an independent film distribution company that Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Marshall Neilan, 1918), Motion Picture News defined "the 'typical' Pickford picture" as one that "shows her in rags and curls, in situations both humorous and dramatic." A newspaper review of M'Liss suggested that the primary strength in this tale of an adolescent stagecoach. no matter what she does in a picture they are sure to term it 'cute,' and in the current offering are many little scenes that call for that expression." In a review of M'Liss (dir. In response to the film, a Variety review suggested that the basis of Pickford's popular appeal was rather obvious: "She and her bag of tricks are so well established. James Kirwood, 1915), Pickford was cast as an adolescent spitfire living in poverty. ![]() Porter, 1914) that articulates one view of the actress's youthful appeal:Īs in Tess, in Rags (dir. In 1914, an industry trade magazine, The Bioscope, published a review of the Pickford box office hit, Tess of the Storm Country (dir. As her career moved into the feature film era, her screen persona grew even younger, until she was, for all intents and purposes, a child impersonator. What made her so popular? What exactly was the appeal of Mary Pickford and of her films? In attempting to answer these questions, it cannot escape notice that from the beginning of Pickford's film career, the actress's characters often are ambiguously inscribed with characteristics of both child and adult woman, as a "child-woman." As I will show, even when she ostensibly is cast as an adult, the grown-up Mary Pickford registers as an adolescent "girl" or a child-woman ambiguously poised between childhood and womanhood. In 1918, an article in American Magazine proclaimed what was by then obvious: "Our Little Mary" had become "the most popular motion picture actress in the world." Pickford was promoted as "America's Sweetheart," "The World's Sweetheart," and, as poet Vachel Lindsay dubbed her, "The Queen of the Movies." Her films for Famous Players in the late 1910s regularly netted over a million dollars a year. In the 1910s, the actress known as "Our Little Mary" quickly cemented her popularity through numerous films that coincided with the Hollywood film industry's shift to using the actor as a personality for drawing audiences to the box office. She first appeared in film in the one-reelers of American Biograph in the Spring of 1909. Also known as Gladys Smith of Toronto, Canada, Mary Pickford became a stage actress at age six (published age five). ![]() Inarguably, she was one of the first major stars of the Hollywood film industry, and one of the very few - female or male - able to sustain stardom for more than twenty years. ![]() Mary Pickford was, arguably, the most famous woman of the first quarter of the twentieth century. Caroline Moore, "Mary Tells of Initial Experiences: Relates Incidents to Tacoma Girl in Interview for Apollo Theater" Vachel Lindsay (1913), opening of "To Mary Pickford Moving Picture Actress (On Hearing She Was Leaving the Moving-Pictures for the Stage)." ![]()
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