If I hadn't fallen in love with Mary Pickford watching Amarilly Of Clothesline Alley, watching My Best Girl would have done the trick just as well.
This is one of the best romantic comedies ever made and perhaps the sweetest, with the possible exception of Griffith's True Heart Susie. It's also a transitional film, I think -- preserving some of the bucolic innocence of Susie while pointing the way to the screwball drawing-room comedies of the Thirties.
The plot is conventional and silly, about on a level with Pretty Woman in that regard -- a young working-class woman with a job in a department store gets involved with the wealthy son of the store's owner, who's working there incognito to get to know the business he will inherit. The film itself, however, is anything but a trifle. When films this simple are this great, there's extraordinary art at work -- a comment I would also make about Murnau's Sunrise, which My Best Girl resembles in some crucial ways. Both are simple love stories about simple, utterly ordinary people, done without a trace of condescension and with moments of poetry which are profound.
I'm beginning to realize that Pickford's range as an actor was awesome. There's a core star persona that migrates from film to film, bits of business and attitude that reference the expectations audiences brought to her films, but the characterizations are unusually diverse for a star, especially a silent film star. Gish always played Gish in silent films, though the complexity of Gish was endless -- Chaplin always played Chaplin, though the inventiveness of Chaplin was inexhaustible. But Amarilly is not My Best Girl's Maggie -- you have a sense of meeting someone wholly different in their respective stories. (And Unity Blake, in Stella Maris, inhabits a different universe from either of them.)
Mostly this is the result of Pickford's uncanny ability to suggest an inner life -- to create reactions to conventional situations which are quirky, distinctive. This has nothing to do with the roles as written, because the roles are somewhat generic, but with Pickford's absolute commitment to the moment, to the cinematic present. It's one of the reasons you can't take your eyes off her.
Buddy Rogers is a charming looking fellow, a competent actor and a very skilled light comedian, but he doesn't convey a lot of gravity when he's onscreen by himself. Yet when Pickford looks at him with an expression that says, "This guy might amount to something," you believe it without question. So many great performances by actors on film are created in the faces of the actors playing opposite them -- Hepburn, for example, wonderful as she is, reaches a whole new level in her work with Spencer Tracy . . . he just very quietly gives her her scenes, and makes us love her in a way we very rarely do when he's not around.
Pickford does the same for Rogers here -- and for the film as a whole, really. This same film, shot for shot, with another actor as the female lead, would be next to nothing. But My Best Girl utterly transcends its apparent limits.
Which is not to say that the filmmaking isn't superb -- and such a treat to experience in the DVD . . . a stunning transfer of a stunning print. Director Sam Taylor knew exactly what he was doing. There are wondrous tracking shots in the film, always associated with key moments in the romantic relationship between Maggie and Joe -- starting with the thrilling shots from the moving truck where Maggie waits for Joe to catch up with her, racing after her on foot. Plastic metaphor doesn't get any more eloquent.
Then there is the sudden, almost jarring pull back from the crate where Maggie and Joe are having lunch, which becomes not just a cute reveal but an evocation of breathlessness. It releases an emotion already created by Pickford's performance -- the physical jolt of pleasure, surprise and fear she conveys when he accidentally puts his arm around her, the anticipation and hopefulness in her darting eyes when he opens her birthday present. Both moments made me cry, simply because they were so heartfelt, yet so subtle -- almost thrown away.
And there are the fine, lyrical follow-shots as the two sweethearts walk through the city in the rain, in the first flush of romance, dodging cars and people, echoing a similar device in Sunrise where the bond between two people is reinforced by their common path through an indifferent urban landscape. In some ways, the simplicity of the shots in My Best Girl, the fact that they don't draw metaphorical attention to themselves, makes them more powerful.
To illustrate the brilliance of the choices Pickford makes as an actor in My Best Girl would be to recapitulate most of her scenes in the film. One that stood out for me was the moment when Maggie first meets Joe's fiancée. She doesn't look at Joe, with hurt and outrage -- the obvious way to play it. She stares at the fiancée -- sizing her up, calculating the difference between them, looking into the fiancée's eyes for the truth about what's really happening. It's heartbreaking, and a perfect moment of perfectly observed human behavior.
It's heartbreaking, too, to think that this was Pickford's last silent film. You get a feeling from My Best Girl that there was some possibility of a synthesis between the silent sensibility, Pickford's belief in simple goodness, and a more modern style. In the final confrontation with Joe and his father in Maggie's kitchen, Pickford seems to be addressing this very issue -- pretending to be a flapper, a hot mama, almost pulling it off . . . but with a bitterness that seems to say, "Is this what you really want from me?"
American movies, and American culture, lost more than we may yet realize when that synthesis didn't happen.