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| Mary Pickford |
Through the Back Door is an above average Mary Pickford vehicle released by United Artists in 1921. The film is credited to the directing team of Alfred E. Green and Jack Pickford, Mary's doomed brother. Green had previously directed Jack in a number of light comic features for the Goldwyn company. Most reports from the set of this film indicate that Jack Pickford's input was minimal. His sister was trying to throw him a bone after the mysterious death of Jack's wife, Olive Thomas, in Paris the previous year. The resultant scandal, a truly sordid and byzantine one, greatly affected the addictive Jack and tarnished his sunny, All-American image. His career never recovered and he slid towards oblivion and an early death. Mary Pickford, in her memoir, characterized Jack and Olive as "children".
Through the Back Door intersects not at all with this sad tale, it alternates between treacle and goofiness. Our Mary plays Jeanne, a Belgian waif abandoned by her mother whose American husband wants his new bride all to himself. Mom sails to America while Jeanne is left in the care of a trusted servant. That servant becomes overly attached to Jeanne and thwarts a reunion with her mother. A few years later, World War 1 intervenes and Jeanne is sent packing to find her mother, who thinks Jeanne is mort. En route, Jeanne takes two war orphans under her wing, one of whom is Peaches Jackson in drag. Whew. Jeanne ends up working as a maid in her grieving mother's house where she is able to expose two grifters, one of whom is Adolphe Menjou, and, at last, reunite her family.
The film caters to Pickford's core audience desire to see her play a scampish pre-pubescent. This is anathema to audiences today, but the more I see of her performances the more I appreciate Pickford's singular talents. The wacky humor of Pickford's tangle with an obdurate mule and her skating routine with brushes are a welcome respite from the hollow contrivances of the melodrama. Green's direction at his best, say Baby Face, is merely amiable, but Through the Back Door boasts impressive cinematography from Charles Rosher (um, Sunrise) and inventive art direction by Stephen Goosson. On the follow up to this film, Little Lord Fauntleroy, which had the same collaborators, Goosson would use similarly oversize sets to help give the illusion that his diminutive star was playing a youngster. Currently streaming in a good print on Tubi.
