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SOME THOUGHTS ON "SUDS" AND THE ART OF MARY PICKFORD
When you discover the work of Mary Pickford, which is now finally practical thanks to the continuing release of her surviving
films on DVD through the Mary Pickford Foundation and Milestone Films, you begin to realize that the entire early history
of cinema needs to be reimagined, reconstructed, rewritten in the light of her awesome art. The most important female artist
of the 20th Century, and indeed one of the most important of any age, Pickford has languished for several generations in an
odd sort of oblivion. She has been hiding in plain sight -- recognized as one of the world icons of silent film, admired
as one of the few powerful female figures in the economic structure of the early film industry, and remembered, fondly or
not, as a curly-headed incarnation of the Victorian child-woman. The echo of her celebrity survives -- her art has been insufficiently
examined and appreciated.
The oblivion was partly of her own making. When she retired from the screen at the dawn of the sound era she also withdrew
her silent-era work from circulation, fearing, it is said, that it would appear ridiculous to modern audiences. But her artistic
despair can easily deflect us from an awareness of the deeper cultural currents that conspired to make her work alien to subsequent
generations. The conversation about gender that she was engaged in took on different terms in the decades that followed her
retirement -- and she may well have calculated that audiences in times to come would find her films not simply laughable,
but incomprehensible.
The time has come to understand her again -- not through her public persona or though her place in the history of the
film industry, but through her work itself.
An examination of that work reveals that her stunning worldwide popularity in the silent era was not founded in her personality,
anymore than Chaplin's was -- it was founded, like Chaplin's, in her art.
Pickford's enduring subject was female power, and she was the product of an epoch in which female power was both recognized
and celebrated . . . though only within the confines of the domestic sphere. Female power outside that sphere was also recognized,
but deeply feared -- as a chaotic sexual force which constituted a threat to the domestic order.
In Pickford's youth, that order was changing rapidly and dramatically, with the hurtling industrialization and urbanization
of the Western powers. Women were entering the industrial workplace and began to constitute a new class in urban centers
-- single, mobile and economically empowered (at least in contrast to women of previous generations.)
Disrespected and feared for their relative independence, this new class of women had no heroes, no role models, no social
validation. Cut off from the prestige women once held as domestic partners -- a prestige whose dimension and profundity are
hard for us to appreciate today -- the modern girl was a social and economic fact but a cultural enigma, perhaps most especially
to herself. Her freedom (always to be understood in relative terms) was alluring and sexually suggestive and it called into
question the traditional female virtues enshrined in purely domestic models. It also provoked reaction and suspicion, as
well as a diminishment of the carefully encoded and socially rigid gallantry that had once been provided to women by men in
the absence of full legal and political status.
It's easy for us today to belittle this code of gallantry -- in an era when the domestic sphere has been devalued in relation
to the public and political spheres. In their just pursuit of status in the latter, feminists themselves contributed unwittingly
to this devaluation -- which has had calamitous social consequences for the institution of the family, and thus for the psychological,
moral and spiritual well-being of children. (The effect of social narcissism on the responsibilities of parenting was a subject
Pickford herself addressed, scathingly, in "Through the Back Door", one of her lesser works, from 1921.)
The power of social conservatism today is founded on the unaccounted losses to the system of child-rearing which have
been among the consequences of the shifting roles of women (and men) in culture. It has resulted in a conflict between those
who want to revalue the domestic sphere, and recognize the crisis it is in, and those who see in that effort a desire to return
to the rigid gender specialization of earlier times. It is an artificial conflict, however -- there is truth and right on
both sides of it.
What we can all too easily forget is that the "patriarchy" of Victorian times incorporated tremendous protections
for women and children, imposed draconian responsibilities on men with respect to women, and had a kind of moral and practical
logic which women themselves found acceptable, or at least workable.
It was the dissolution of this system -- the withdrawal of respect for women and the retreat from responsibility by men
-- which left the modern girl in her quandary . . . because the rights of patriarchy were still asserted, in default of its
duties. A new conversation was in order, a renegotiation of terms -- which in practice took many shapes, from the movement
for women's suffrage to the revolt against restrictive clothing, and often without the conscious awareness of the participants.
It is not surprising that this conversation took its most spectacular form in the movies, beginning in the earliest days
of the silent era. Urban working-class women were a key component of the early film audience -- and new images of women,
new impulses for freedom, were affecting women at every level. (One reason for the popularity of early boxing films was that
they allowed women to witness, at one remove, events which they were barred by social convention from attending in person.)
The freewheeling nature of the early film business -- which could not be regularized even by the potent corporate power
of Thomas Edison -- made a place for the marginalized voices of society. Immigrants and women could make movies -- as long
as those movies proved themselves popular with audiences, which of course were made up in large part of immigrants and women.
Competition for these audiences affected even the most hide-bound of Victorian men, if they had sound intuitions about
the popular taste. D. W. Griffith, who provided his audiences with rigid Victorian stereotypes of female virtue, at the same
time presided over a shift in the physical image of women in the popular mind. The plump, sofa-like bodies of the earliest
stars gave way to the lithe, mobile forms of the Gish sisters and Mae Marsh, and Griffith had a place for amazonian versions
of these new stripped-down girls, best exemplified in the feisty person of the Mountain Girl in "Intolerance".
Griffith also made a star of Pickford -- though the limits of his vision of woman ensured that he couldn't keep her within
his orbit for long. Pickford was one of the first stars to recognize her own economic worth and also one of the first with
the courage and smarts to try and exploit it herself.
She was not alone, though. The extremely popular and longest-running serial of the early silent era, "The Hazards
Of Helen", had a star who came to insist on writing episodes herself, since she felt that male writers were not making
her character plucky enough. This serial, like many others in the same vein, presented women caught up in the machinery of
the modern age and triumphing over it with courage and wit. This, too, was part of the conversation the modern girl was having
with her culture.
Pickford was well suited for her role in this conversation. Like many female theatrical stars of the era she came from
a family which had lost its domestic "patriarch". Pickford assumed responsibility, through her talent, for the
family's financial well-being, and was thus herself uniquely positioned to comprehend the marooned girls of her generation
-- to sympathize with their plight and to celebrate their triumphs.
Many stars of Pickford's background were content to move into traditional roles once they achieved prominence -- to play
subservient lovers and faithful wives, or fatal femmes, in accord with the old routines. But Pickford was not -- that was
her genius and her glory. Like Chaplin she never forgot where she came from and never stopped speaking to the ones she left
behind there -- most especially to the women she left behind there.
This not to say that she was a feminist in any conventional sense of the word, but that is what makes her work so interesting
today. She was still engaged in a good-faith conversation with the collapsing patriarchy, often in the very terms and structures
it preferred to use. The artificial lines of conflict had not yet been established. Pickford appealed to the Victorian reverence
for the domestic sphere, to the Victorian celebration of female chastity and virtue, to the gallantry of the Victorian male.
But she inflected her appeal with a resolute insistence on the equality of her voice, the value of her competence, the moral
authority of her argument. She believed, almost to the last, that humane dialogue was possible, in a language that could
bridge the gender-dislocations of the modern world.
"Suds", a Pickford masterpiece from 1920, can serve as a paradigm for all of Pickford's work. It was based on a
one-act curtain raiser called "'Op o' Me Thumb", which had been a theatrical vehicle for Maude Adams in 1905. It's
the story of a Cockney laundry girl with a crush on one of the laundry's patrons. He's left a shirt he never comes to claim
and she washes it twice a week so it will be fresh when he finally does retrieve it. Her devotion is in fact a hopeless dream
of rescue from the hard life she leads -- all the more poignant for the fact that she is a plain girl with little hope of
rescue by anyone.
The female world of the London laundry has a Dickensian quality, in line with the many picturesque but damning portraits
of the plight of the urban working poor in Dickens's fiction. It also has iconic power in two respects -- first as a bastion
of female solidarity and second as an emblem of the shift of familiar female work from the domestic to the public sphere.
Degas had been attracted to the commercial laundry as a place to study the female form under pressure -- just as the ballet
classroom and stage were -- and as a world where the female presence dominated, as it did at the ballet. The image of the
laundry as an urban sweatshop also had clear parallels with all the sweatshops where women were worked like animals in urban
centers at the turn of the century. (Pickford had already made a more explicit protest against these sweatshops in "The
Eternal Grind" of 1916.)
In "Suds", Pickford drew on all these iconic elements in creating the environment her central character, Amanda
Afflick, inhabits. And I think it's clear that she saw in the central running gag of the unclaimed washing a powerful metaphor
for the stranded condition of the modern girl -- the male who used to be her partner in the social scheme has become an empty
shirt.
The opening titles announce this very explicitly --- "No hero here with passion pants . . . this is the tale of a
shirt." And in stop motion on screen we then see the empty shirt rise from its wrapping and stand erect. Who will fill
the shirt is, ultimately, the question the film asks.
The most astonishing thing about the film is the guise in which Pickford, the star, presents herself -- as a plain, even
ugly girl. There is no hint of the gorgeous waif with a smudged face which would have been the conventional and superficial
way to an audience's heart in a role like this. Pickford's make-up and stooped carriage are frankly unattractive. In one
scene in which Amanda fantasizes about a glamorous past Pickford appears as a radiant duchess -- but the scene is played as
mocking satire, as storybook nonsense, and only serves to accentuate the real Amanda's physical plainness.
The characterization is not as extreme as Pickford's incarnation of Unity Blake in "Stella Maris", which borders
on the grotesque, but it is just as pure and unflinching. It can take its place with any of Lon Chaney's extreme characterizations
-- and Chaney was not a romantic leading man. For Pickford to present herself this way to her adoring fans was an extraordinary
thing for a romantic leading lady to do. What's most important about it is that it shows she was not primarily addressing
men, or at least not willing to coddle the expectations of men, in "Suds". Amanda, and Unity Blake, are heroes
who speak to every woman who has ever doubted her cosmetic appeal to men -- ever resented the commerce in appearances which
makes up so much of what the world likes to think of as romance and "love."
For the miracle of Amanda Afflick, as of Unity Blake, is that she is an amazing woman, a beautiful woman, a truly romantic
woman and a hero. She springs from her beaten-down crouch into sublime and graceful action when the moment demands it --
she carries herself with defensive but admirable self-possession. Her energy and her resolution elevate her to heroic status.
The grim environment of the laundry is dissipated by the wild slapstick antics that Amanda executes there to recover herself
from her blunders. It becomes an arena where triumph is possible.
We are here speaking of a method unique to great silent films, where the body of the performer, the way it moves through
space, is the primary conveyor of character, on which the text, and sometimes even the narrative, only comment obliquely.
The way Pickford moves as Amanda tells us more about her than her make-up or her lines or even her role in the story ever
could. It tells us that she is a woman, and a human being, to be reckoned with.
There is a subplot in the film which centers on the predicament of an old delivery-cart horse who's reached the end of
his working life and is to be sold for glue. Amanda rescues him -- using all her pitiful reserves of cash to do so. She,
and we, can clearly see in the image of the animal worked half to death and then abandoned an image of Amanda's fate. She
brings the horse back to her tenement apartment and combs it, cleans and curls its tail and festoons it with ribbons -- in
a surreal scene that, like many in the film, helps to give "Suds" its expressionistic and metaphorical weight.
(It ought to be noted that Amanda gives the horse's mane and tail "Pickford curls" -- which are otherwise not on
display in this film.)
Amanda rescues the horse, but who will rescue Amanda? Not the owner of the shirt -- who turns out to be a kindly enough
fellow who would clearly be embarrassed to be seen in public with a wretch like Amanda Afflick. As soon as Amanda realizes
this she knows that this particular dream of rescue is hopeless, and she abandons it courageously and graciously. A potential
suitor lurks about the doorway with some flowers for her, but hasn't got the gumption to approach her.
She's alone, and she cries out in despair, "Who would love me? Who could?" This is the way the play ends,
and was one of the endings Pickford considered, but finally she decided to tack on a more hopeful coda -- in two versions,
both of which are included on the Milestone DVD. They are both negligible and unconvincing. The authentic ending is the
question itself -- not a Chaplinesque bid for pity, or even an exercise in tearjerking, but a genuine question . . . the question
of the modern girl before she gave up hope of hearing an acceptable answer from the empty shirt.
It's one of the great tragedies of film preservation that the domestic release version of "Suds" exists only
in a poor 16mm print preserved by the Library Of Congress. Watching it is like viewing the film through dirty glass. A crisp
35mm print of the foreign release version, made up of alternate takes and with a slightly different editing scheme, was preserved
by Pickford, and is included on Milestone's DVD release of the film as a supplement to the domestic version. The foreign
release version is generally inferior in all but image quality -- Pickford's performance in the assembly of alternate takes
is not as sharp and coherent as it is in the domestic version and the editing overall is not as tight and propulsive. Still,
it's good to have the foreign version in order to fully appreciate the beauty of the film's images -- carefully lit and composed
by the brilliant Charles Rosher, here assisted by L. W. O'Connell. The milieu of working-class London presented in "Suds"
is atmospheric but never glamorized -- a perfect complement to Pickford's masterful and uncompromsing portrayal of Amanda.
It's interesting to compare the ending of this film with the far more celebrated ending of Chaplin's "City Lights".
The destruction of Amanda's dreams is beautifully observed and played -- fully, almost brutally realized dramatically and
psychologically. The contrived bathos of the "City Lights" ending, largely masked by Chaplin's sublime final close-up,
seems like a stunt by comparison, an ambiguous cop-out which concludes but does not resolve the drama that's gone before it.
The commentary on the DVD refers to the scene of Amanda's despair as "the Chaplin ending", but it's far more powerful
than any ending Chaplin ever concocted -- and it involves a far more courageous and skillful piece of acting.
When Pickford takes her rightful place in the pantheon of early film artists, it is not only her work which will come
under new scrutiny and evaluation.
With the possible exceptions of "Intolerance" and "Greed", which are very special cases indeed, "Suds"
is as great as any film made in the silent era, as great as any film Chaplin ever made, as great as any film Keaton ever made.
But to most it's just a Pickford film -- a vehicle for America's Sweetheart. That phrase continues to damn her. Grand as
it is it diminishes her stature as a filmmaker, as an artist -- institutionalizes her as the object of a nation's affection
and hides the true source of that affection . . . her profound aesthetic and moral genius.
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