“No hill-topper kin look me down.”
If lines like this make you wince, you’re on to why I don’t like Tess of the Storm Country. It’s not that I mind an accent, even a hokey, broad, vaudevillian accent that audiences in 1922 would have read and heard hundreds of times. It works here. Mary Pickford’s Tess speaks and acts like the unkempt, uneducated, pretense-free wharf-rat she is, and the scruffy fishermen and washerwomen populating her village at the bottom of the hill are equally believable—as comic characters. Trouble is, Tess of the Storm Country ain’t comedy. Nor is it comedy-drama, nor tragic romance; it’s a grim two hours of classism, sexism, murder and rape, suicide, infanticide and wrongful conviction. Yes, there’s laughs, especially in the first half; there’s a love story too, but if ever Pickford needed to play a role totally straight, it was here. And she didn’t.
