I fell in love with Mary Pickford when I watched this film a few years ago. I know you're probably thinking, "What took you so long?", but I really hadn't seen much of her work before -- some of the Biograph shorts she made for D. W. Griffith and Sparrows, one of her later silents. I liked Sparrows a lot, thought it was a very well-made film, and admired Pickford's craft extravagantly . . . but there was something self-conscious about it, something built into the idea of a masterful artist playing a child, which had the flavor of a brilliant (a really brilliant) stunt.
But when I watched Amarilly Of Clothesline Alley all my resistance melted. First of all, Pickford plays a sexually mature female, innocent by choice but well aware of her options -- and she's very sexy, very self-possessed and powerful, which makes her goodness all the more vexing. The whole film is permeated with a strong aura of female power, expressed most poignantly and convincingly in the easy camaraderie between Amarilly and her mother -- you get a sense that there's no problem on earth these two can't solve . . . and haven't solved, in a sense, keeping a fatherless family together in crushing poverty. (You also get a clear echo of Pickford's actual early life, growing up too fast, more of a peer than a daughter to her own mother.)
The wry eye they throw on the rest of the world, especially the world of men, delightfully underlined in the snappy intertitles by Frances Marion, their exuberant enjoyment of each other's company, and of life itself, exactly as it is, suggest a whole universe of female self-sufficiency and dominion which our culture has managed to eradicate almost entirely from the mainstream of popular art. (I begin to think that the national euphoria over Pickford's marriage to Douglas Fairbanks may have reflected America's pride, and perhaps relief, that the country managed to produce a man worthy of her.)
The style of the film as a whole, and Pickford's performance in particular, is shockingly casual, fast-paced, breezy and naturalistic -- Amarilly seems to have a whole and real and complicated inner self which she chooses to share with others, and with us, out of sheer generosity and goodwill. Virtue has never seemed so alive, so glamorous.
Well, I'm not the first person this has happened to, and thanks to the miracle of DVDs, I won't be the last.