Douglas Fairbanks, born this day

Today's Photo: Mary Pickford

The Little American (1917)

This post is part of Classic Movies’ Mary Pickford Blogathon, which is rolling right now.

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It’s important to know, before you slip a copy of this movie into your DVD player, or even read this post, that The Little American was directed by Cecil B. DeMille. Knowing this makes The Little American a more fulfilling viewing experience. It explains things.

DeMille’s sort of a controversial figure in film history. He’s remembered as a director who put the public’s appetites ahead of its need for art—giving them what they wanted in the form of splashy, often hugely expensive films that were thin on insight. He directed a silent film about Joan of Arc (no, not that one); he made two versions of The Ten Commandments and the humbly titled Greatest Show on Earth (considered by some to be the weakest-ever Best Picture winner, though it’s not even close). When he died in 1959, DeMille was planning a movie about space travel.

I wish he’d lived to make that one. It would have told us nothing about space, but an awful lot about what people hoped to find there.

DeMille had a gift for recognizing the public’s desires and delivering a product that met them. Yet The Little American seems not to be an example of this. It seems, instead, an attempt to change the public’s collective mind—a tool designed to steel Americans’ resolve for a bloody conflict their country had just joined.