Yesterday I told a Toronto International Film Festival staffer that this city is one of the best in North America for silent film. Not only do we have TIFF Bell Lightbox, our still-new festival theatre, showing silent films regularly with live accompaniment; we also have smaller theatres showing silents in regular rotating programs, plus the Toronto Silent Film Festival, the Toronto Urban Film Festival, and some truly tricked-out rental stores offering obscurities I’ve never heard of until I start to browse. Yes, we’re lucky here in Toronto. New York and Los Angeles may offer more, but they’re an awful lot bigger too.
I had this chat at the Lightbox, following a very interesting pair of lectures on the career of Mary Pickford. Profs. Charlie Keil and Rob King educated us (a nearly-full auditorium) on the development of both cinematic acting and the movie star-as-public-entity—concepts that could not be seriously discussed without mentioning Pickford. Sandwiched between the lectures were 35-mm prints of three Pickford Biograph shorts: Wilful Peggy; An Arcadian Maid (both 1910); and The New York Hat (1912). The first film was used to demonstrate Pickford’s mastery of the older, ‘histrionic’ style of film acting; the second, her equal mastery of the developing ‘verisimilar’ style, characterized by fewer outsized gestures and channeling of internal conflict through props. Kudos to Prof. Keil for reminding us that histrionic does not equal ‘bad’, even if we laugh at it now.
The New York Hat, a 16-minute film and Pickford’s last for Biograph, shows her embracing verisimilitude as fully as she ever would. She plays Mollie Goodhue, the only child of a just-widowed Calvinist-type (Charles Hill Mailes). Mrs. Goodhue, who expires in the film’s opening scene, leaves Preacher Bolton (Lionel Barrymore) a letter: in it she confides that her husband ‘worked her to death’ and begs the minister to spare Mollie that fate. What she really means is that he allowed his wife not the slightest frivolous pleasure, and her daughter, who loves beautiful clothing but doesn’t own a stitch of it, faces the same joyless, frugal life. Preacher Bolton agrees to take a bit of money the mother stashed away and buy Mollie something she’d like, from time to time. The father is not to know.
