The Sunday Intertitle: Clan of the Care Bear
It seems I have a silent movie near-namesake! Here he is:
Well, that sounds like me alright.
The movie is PRIDE OF THE CLAN, directed by Maurice Tourneur and starring Mary Pickford (America’s Sweetheart) and Matt Moore (America’s Sweatpants). It’s set on a bleak Scottish island (I always associate the clans more with the mainland highlands) and contrasts the hard-scrabble life of the fishing folk with Mary’s spirited insouciance and ineffable perkiness.
The movie is not to be confused with PRIDE OF THE KLAN, in which Mary leads a lynch mob with all the spirited insouciance and ineffable perkiness her fans have come to know and… no, I’ll stop. No truth in that.
This film is very thin on story, so we get a lot of scenes of Mary just doing stuff, generally, which I guess is what her fans wanted. I their list of priorities, scenes of Mary doing stuff were at the top. Scenes of Mary doing nothing rated slightly lower. Scenes of anyone else doing stuff didn’t rate at all, unless perhaps they were looking at photographs of Mary.
Tourneur contributes some of his trademark visual flourishes, with some nice modeled lighting, shadow-show atmospherics, and moody location work (Marblehead, Mass, doubled for Scotland). But there’s not much for him to get to grips with.
Future star Leatrice Joy apparently appears as an extra, but I didn’t spot her.
July 24, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Synchronicity, synchronicity … is Leatrice Joy going to haunt Shadowplay henceforth?
Immediately I felt the immanence of a really beautiful James Joyce – Leatrice Joy connection. I haven’t found it, although they both died on May 13th. Shadowplayers … ?
However, while poking around, I discovered that: “… a 1939 Washington Post column claimed that [Gertrude Stein] was sufficiently confident of her celebrity status to challenge popular screen actress Miriam Hopkins to a bet that would test the limits of their respective fame. According to Leonard Lyons, the column’s author, Stein invited Hopkins to walk with her from Columbus Circle to Times Square, wagering $500 that she would receive more requests for autographs than the screen star.”
July 24, 2011 at 5:11 pm
Well, sharing a date of death is a good start for the Joy/Joyce connection!
I like the fame test. Bunuel, to tease his friend Fernando Rey’s vanity, once bribed someone to ask for his autograph, ignoring Rey who was sat at the same restaurant table.
Rey immediately laughed and said he knew it was a joke, since for anybody to recognize Bunuel and not himself was absurd.
As a star of DeMille’s 10 Commandments, Leatrice has crept into Shadowplay by the back door of The Forgotten, and looks set to haunt the place awhile.
July 24, 2011 at 8:53 pm
lol…Come on Mary…DO stuff..jus’..do what you do…
I’ve been revisiting some of Mary’s films lately..think I’m gonna watch My Best Girl tonight…Great silhouette pic at the bottom there.
July 25, 2011 at 11:05 am
Both Tourneurs are masters of shadow and silhouette.
What’s your favourite Pickford?