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Mary Pickford's "Tess Of the Storm Country", from 1922, is bound to be a problematic film for modern audiences.
Its genre, the spiritual tear-jerker, is no longer congenial, especially when the religious motif is explicit. There have
been respectable examples of the form ever since Dickens raised it to the level of art in the perennially effective "A
Christmas Carol". John Ford, in his silent "Three Bad Men", in "The Informer" and in "Three
Godfathers" kept it alive well into the 20th Century. But it unsettles many people today, as does any overt demonstration
of denominational faith. Mel Gibson's "The Passion" bewildered and embarrassed many commentators -- not just because
of its alleged anti-Semitism, but because of the frankness of faith it professed.
The spiritual tear-jerker is a tricky genre in any age, since it's so tempting to use conventional religious platitudes
in place of honest religious sentiment, and the platitudes that speak to one generation can quickly seem utterly hollow to
succeeding ones. "A Christmas Carol" succeeds so well because it makes little reference to doctrinal formulas in
its parable-like evocation of the meaning of Christmas. It's also clever and funny and well-rooted in plausible character.
"Tess"'s success in these terms is mixed. It's a well-made, sometimes inspired film, beautifully photographed
and expertly paced, with moments of great poetry and force. But Pickford, in remaking this story she'd done before in 1914,
in reprising a character she said was her favorite of all her roles, often seems more to be resurrecting an idea than incarnating
a living woman.
It's the exceptions to this observation that reinforce the truth of it. Pickford, about 30 when she made the film, plays
a 17 year-old innocent, and when she lends the character more than a hint of her own self-awareness and irony and intelligence,
the years fall away from the actor and don't matter. When she's too deliberately adorable, too aggressively juvenile, she
enters the territory of impersonation, of caricature.
There's nothing intrinsically absurd about a mature actor playing a juvenile. Barthlemess pulled it off brilliantly in
"Tol'able David", because the mannerisms of youth were so carefully and sympathetically observed, so perfectly incarnated
in his whole physical being. Pickford has many moments of comparable effectiveness -- but just as many more when she seems
to be trying too hard, looking at her character from the outside.
Among the former, wondrous moments is the scene when she first meets Frederick, her eventual love interest, and he mocks
her. She laughs along with him, at herself, and a window opens onto the intellect and self-awareness of Tess, not as primal
and innocent as she acts. And there is the lovely moment when she's outside her shack dancing a silly and yet utterly charming
jig to her father's concertina. Frederick sees her, she's embarrassed, then furious at being embarrassed, and she goes on
with the jig, just as silly and charming as before -- only she can't look at him while she's doing it.
Moments of pure, complex, well-observed and beautifully-executed physical drama like this have all but vanished from the
screen, and even one of them is enough to propel a silent film beyond its more mundane literary bounds. There are many such
moments in "Tess", such as the scene when Frederick and Tess first declare their love for each other as his coat
catches fire on a hook by the hearth. The sleeve burns off, and neither notices, even when he puts the coat back on and they
bid each other a protracted farewell. Conventions of the sound film lead one to expect some kind of snappy verbal pay-off
to such a gag. But it's the fact that there is no pay-off that tells the story -- these two are just besotted with each other.
The film-making is competent throughout, but as the strands of the drama weave together at the end there are some stunning
flourishes, involving nature and the weather -- the images grow louder as it were, in almost musical ways.
After Ben's attempted rape of Tess is foiled by the faithful dog, we cut away to Tess, safe at last, then back to Ben,
regaining consciousness in a rain storm that appears to have materialized out of nowhere. He suddenly seems like a ghost rising
from the dead. When the hero's sister attempts suicide and is rescued by Tess, it all plays out against the plastic violence
of wind-whipped trees and roiling river currents. And snow drifts down like tangible grace throughout the entire finale of
the film.
The frank and wildly sentimental tale told here is effective even when its sentiment is crude, and despite the over-reliance
on explicit appeals to Christian imagery and scripture. Pickford's persona survives and dominates, even when her choices as
an actor seem too easy, too obvious. The heroism of Chaplin's tramp resides in the triumph of his instinctive, endlessly inventive,
anarchic joy over all the conventional forces of the world. The heroism of Pickford's girl characters resides in the triumph
of their instinctive, fearless, unanswerable goodness over all the conventional forces of the world -- most specifically the
world of men.
The reconciliation in the church between the fallen woman and the good girl who has covered for her, over the body of
a dead baby, is finally a drama played out only between two women, in the glare of male disapproval and mistrust. Its power
brings the world of men to its knees.
Pickford and her writers give us plenty of excuses to laugh at all this -- the dead baby gets handed off like a football
once too often, the intertitles hit us over the head with the moral way too hard. But the grace notes in Pickford's performance,
insufficient as we may feel them to be over the course of the whole film, the sheer audacity of the melodrama, even the lyrical
drift of the snow itself . . . all somehow add up to an emotional catharsis which can't be laughed away.
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