Famous Players

Role: Hulda
Co-stars: Frank Losee, John Bowers, Russell Bassett, Harold Hollacher, Charles E. Vernon
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: John B. O’Brien
Screenwriter: Scenario by Edith Barnard Delano
Cinematographer: Emmett Williams
Filming Location: Dutch village exteriors shot in Water Mill, Southampton, NY.

Original review from  The Moving Picture World  (Aug. 12, 1916):

‘Hulda from Holland’ as a picture will delight friends of Miss Pickford everywhere. Hulda as a characterization is filled with charm, with the distinctive bits that seem to be Miss Pickford’s sole property in spite of manifold efforts by numerous others to appropriate them.

Role: Mary
Co-stars: Loretta Blake, Dorothy West, John Bowers, Robert Cain, J. Albert Hall
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: John B. O’Brien
Screenwriter: William H. Clifford
Cinematographer: Emmett Williams

Original review from  Everybody’s Magazine  (May 1916):

Mary Pickford’s recent film, ‘The Eternal Grind,’ is typical. She works in a sweat-shop. How poor she is! And how sweaty is that shop! But how bravely she bears it! … Then comes villainy. She looks into his eyes. And, really, she is a magnificent actress, and that is the sort of moment when she is at her best. Her face can change from happy innocence to suspicion, to dread, to flaming hate, while still retaining all its innocence…

Role: Cho-Cho-San
Co-stars: Marshall Neilan, Olive West, Jane Hall, Lawrence Wood, Caroline Harris, M.W. Rale, W.T. Carleton, David Burton, Frank Dekum, Caesere Gravina
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: Sidney Olcott
Screenwriter: Based on the 1898 novella by John Luther Long
Cinematographer: Hal Young
Filming Location: New Jersey, New York City

Note: Broadway producer David Belasco was the first to dramatize Long’s story for his 1900 stage production.

Original review from  Variety  (Nov. 12, 1915):

For many moons it has been stated, and repeated, in the motion picture fraternity that Mary Pickford was a wonderful artist along certain lines, but that said lines were limited and quite circumscribed. This statement had become so familiar that it was generally accepted as a fact. Well, you Doubting Thomases and Unbelievers, go to the Strand this week to see her in the Famous Players’ (Paramount) production of ‘Mme. Butterfly’ and disabuse your minds of any such idea once and for all. … Words are useless to describe the beauty and artistry of it all – the production, the photography … and above all else, Mary Pickford. The Famous Players has never turned out a finer feature – nor indeed has anybody else.

Role: Jane Stuart
Co-stars: Jack Pickford, Gertrude Norman, Marshall Neilan, Frances Marion, Lillian Langdon, Claire Alexander, Glenn Martin
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: Allan Dwan
Screenwriter: Mary Pickford, story by Wesley C. MacDermott
Filming Location: Airplane scenes shot at Griffith Park; Catalina scenes shot aboard John Spreckels’ yacht; Interiors shot at Clune Studios in Hollywood, CA (now Raleigh Studios).

Note:  A Girl of Yesterday  is notable for being the only feature in which Mary and Jack Pickford play brother and sister. Mickey Neilan credits Frances Marion with writing the story.

Original review from  Variety  (Oct. 15, 1915):

‘A Girl of Yesterday’ with Mary Pickford as the star … is so arranged to give Mary Pickford an opportunity to display a lot of gowns and the fact that she can play a little golf, is a good little sailor, is not afraid to go up in an airship and, last, but not least, it gives the public another opportunity of looking at this little queen of the screen.

Role: Esmeralda Rogers
Co-stars: Ida Waterman, Fuller Mellish, Arthur Hoops, William Buckley, Charles Waldron
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: James Kirkwood
Screenwriter: Frances Marion, based on the 1881 play by Frances Hodgson Burnett and William Gillette, adapted from the 1887 short story by Burnett
Cinematographer: Emmett A. Williams

Note:  Though reviews of the film were not overwhelmingly positive,  Esmeralda  was another smash hit for Mary; the Strand in New York reported “packed houses”and “standing-room only”shows. Sadly, the only remaining copy of the film decomposed due to improper storage in the 1950s and is now lost.

Original review from  Photoplay  (Nov. 1915):

Miss Pickford is enshrined in the hearts of all the people, not because she is the sweetest of the limpid non-entities, but because she is a young woman of powerful personality and extraordinary dramatic talent. Hers is the art which conceals itself. Such hen-yarn drama as ‘Esmeralda’ is as unworthy of criticism as it is unworthy of Mary Pickford.

Role: Rags/Alice McCloud
Co-stars: Marshall Neilan, Joseph Manning, J. Farrell MacDonald
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: James Kirkwood
Screenwriter: Frances Marion, Mary Pickford, based on the 1915 novel by Edith Barnard Delano
Cinematographer: Emmett A. Williams

Note:  Some sources claim that Pickford was the inspiration for Delano’s novel; whether or not this is true, the role of a fiery mining-town girl suited the actress perfectly and was a box-office smash. According to Mary, it was seeing the large crowds lined up to see  Rags  that led her to renegotiate her contract with Famous Players.

Original review from  The Moving Picture World  (Aug. 14, 1915):

In writing the scenario for ‘Rags’ it is evident that Edith Barnard Delano had the most likable traits of Mary Pickford’s personality in mind and aimed to produce a story in which they might be revealed in all their variety. … From beginning to end it is a picture of the winsome little star in a career humorous and pathetic by turns and occasionally dramatic.

Role: ‘Little Pal’
Co-stars: Russell Bassett, George Anderson, William Lloyd, Constance Johnson, Joseph Manning, Bert Hadley
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: James Kirkwood
Screenwriter: Marshall Neilan
Cinematographer: Emmett A. Williams

Note:  Little Pal  would prove to be one of Mary’s least popular roles; she played an Inuit girl at the insistence of Adolph Zukor, who sought to increase her worldwide popularity by casting her as women of different nationalities.

Original review from  Variety  (July 2, 1915):

‘Little Pal’ will be welcome to those who claim there is such thing as a ‘platonic friendship,’outside the stage or between book covers. Now the pictures have it, in the Famous Players’ latest Mary Pickford production. … The F.P. has its customary faultless production. Several exquisite snow scenes are pictured at intervals. … the picture is an interesting one.

Role: Glad
Co-stars: David Powell, Forrest Robinson, Robert Cain, Margaret Seddon, Blanche Craig, Ogden Childe
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: James Kirkwood
Screenwriter: Eve Unsell, based on the 1906 novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Note: The Dawn of a Tomorrow  was re-released by Paramount in 1919.

Original review from  Variety  (June 18, 1915):

The Famous Players in this latest Mary Pickford feature has turned out a subject that carries plenty of interest in theme with a brand of first grade photography supporting it to land it among the top-notch list of current releases. Pickford is given full reign in her tattered garments and Pickford in rags can do considerable before a camera.

Role: Dolly Lane
Co-stars: James Kirkwood, Lowell Sherman, Ida Waterman, Russell Bassett
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: James Kirkwood
Screenwriter: Based on the 1911 play by Margaret Mayo
Cinematographer: Emmett A. Williams

Note:  Behind the Scenes  is notable in being one of the few films in which Mary portrays an actress.

Original review from  Variety  (Oct. 31, 1914):

In this feature Miss Pickford is seen from every angle in all of her camera moods, and to those who are Pickford fans it will be a feast. … The cuteness of Mary Pickford is proverbial. She alone can carry this picture, and that she will to big returns goes without saying, for besides Pickford, it has ‘the stage’from the inside.

Role: Queen Anna Victoria
Co-stars: Carlyle Blackwell, Harold Lockwood, Russell Bassett, Arthur Hoops
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: Edwin S. Porter, Hugh Ford
Screenwriter: Hugh Ford, based on the 1909 stage play by Channing Pollock
Cinematographer: Ernest Hall

Note:  Originally produced at Broadway’s Hackett Theatre in 1909,  Such a Little Queen  was remade by Realart Pictures in 1921, with Constance Binney in the lead.

Original review from  The Moving Picture World  (Oct. 3, 1914):

Miss Mary Pickford has the role of Queen Anna Victoria of Herzegovina; and her performance is that of rare quality which we always expect from this star. Comedy and drama are alike to her. She is as delightful in the one as she is moving in the other. As a comedienne she seldom does the anticipated; and therein to a great degree lies the charm of her work.

Role: Anemone Breckenridge
Co-stars: James Kirkwood, Ida Waterman, Robert Broderick, Harry C. Browne, Helen Gillmore, Jack Pickford, R.J. Henry, J. Albert Hall
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Paramount Pictures
Director: James Kirkwood
Screenwriter: Eve Unsell, based on the 1914 novel by Anna Alice Chapin
Cinematographer: Emmett A. Williams

Note: Long considered lost, a print of  The Eagle’s Mate  was acquired by the George Eastman House in 2000.

Original review from  Variety  (July 10, 1914):

Mary Pickford … is one of the few picture actresses, or actors for that matter, who can interject personality into a negative. She breathes the role taken, and it fits her, up, down and all around. … ‘The Eagle’s Mate’is a lively feature without a real kick – but it has Mary Pickford, better than the best kick or punch that could have been put in, for Mary Pickford is the Ruth Chatterton of the movies.

(Only one reel remains)

Role: Juliet
Co-stars: Ernest Truex, William Norris, David Belasco, Iva Merlin, Wilda Bennett, Arthur Hill, Edward Connelly
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Famous Players-Lasky Corporation
Director: Edwin S. Porter (and J. Searle Dawley, uncredited)
Screenwriter: Based on the play by Austin Strong, adapted from the French play  Un bon petit diable by Rosemonde Gerard and Maurice Rostand
Cinematographer: Edwin S. Porter

Note: Mary had played the same role in David Belasco’s 1913 stage version of  A Good Little Devil.

Original review from Variety (March 6, 1914):

Here’s one film on which the movie exhibitor of the country can’t go wrong. … There’s a lot of good, wholesome fun in ‘A Good Little Devil’and there’s fantastical trimmings of the fairy land sort and real pathos of the typical kind that motherless little kids encounter each day that combine in making the play a movie worth while. Miss Pickford does bully work as the blind girl and makes the role stand out as a lovable, childlike sympathetic bit of acting that is irresistible.

Role: Nina
Co-stars: Harold Lockwood
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company/Famous Players-Lasky Corporation
Director: Edwin S. Porter
Screenwriter: Mary Pickford, based on the 1911 novel  As the Sparks Fly Upward  by Cyrus Townsend Brady
Cinematographer: Edwin S. Porter
Filming Location: Los Angeles and Southern California coast

Note:  Hearts Adrift  was the first feature produced by Famous Players on the West Coast. Novelist Cyrus Townsend Brady sued Famous Players for using his story without his consent; modern sources credit Townsend.

Original review from  The Moving Picture World  (January 1914):

Mary Pickford, the celebrated film favorite, makes her reappearance in the productions of the Famous Players in ‘Hearts Adrift,’ a tragic epic of the deep… The pathos of this drama is softened by Miss Pickford’s charming and piquant portrayal of the role of the little half-savage Nina. At frequent periods in the story Miss Pickford attains high dramatic power, and strikes a distinct note in her delicate rendition of her supreme sacrifice of self for love.

Role: Mercy Baxter
Co-stars: Owen Moore, Ernest Truex, Ogden Crane, James Gordon, Boots Wall
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company
Director: J. Searle Dawley
Screenwriter: Based on the 1884 play by Howard P. Taylor
Cinematographer: H. Lyman Broening

Note:  Originally a stage hit starring Minnie Maddern Fiske, Caprice  was so popular that Paramount re-released it to theaters in 1918.

Original review from the  Los Angeles Times  (Nov. 15, 1913):

Little Mary of Biograph fame … will appear in ‘Caprice,’ Mrs. Fiske’s former success. No better play could have been selected for her inimitable daintiness. It is a delightful comedy-drama of love and society, with an echo of the hills mingled with the voice of the city. Mary Pickford in ‘The Bishop’s Carriage’broke all records at Tally’s Broadway. ‘Caprice’should prove even more of a drawing card.

Role: Nance Olden
Co-stars: David Wall, House Peters, Grace Henderson, George Moss, Howard Missimer, Camille Dalberg, John Steppling
Prod/Dist Co: Famous Players Film Company
Director: J. Searle Dawley and Edwin S. Porter
Screenwriter: B.P. Schulberg, adapted from the 1907 play by Channing Pollock, based on the 1904 novel by Miriam Michelson
Cinematographer: H. Lyman Broening

Note:  In the Bishop’s Carriage  was remade in 1920 by Realart Pictures with Bebe Daniels in the Nance Olden role.

Original review from  The Moving Picture World, Sept. 20, 1913:

It is several months since picture lovers have seen on the screen Mary Pickford in a new film. In this refined melodrama they will see Little Mary in a new light. ‘In the Bishop’s Carriage’ is a crook play; nevertheless its treatment is so artistic, so delicate, so finished, that it will please every division of society.