Marshall Neilan | A Little Princess / 1917

turns of fortune

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frances Marion (screenplay, based on a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett), Marshall Neilan (director) A Little Princess / 1917

 

This first version of the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, an hour-long silent film from 1917 is a truly surprisingly well directed and coherent work, with director Marshall Neilan combining long perspective shots, alternating simultaneous scenes, and ambitious story-telling landscapes, within the more domestic drama of the London boarding school into which the slightly spoiled Sara Crewe (Mary Pickford) is placed by her India-based father, Captain Richard Crewe (Norman Kerry).

 

    For the first long part of this film, despite her despair for now having lost immediate contact with her beloved daddy, the mean boarding school mistresses, Miss Minchin (Katherine Griffith) and her sister Amelia (Ann Schaefer) go out of their way to treat the new girl, who her fellow residents dub “the little princess,” extremely well, expecting annual benefits from her wealthy father. Even the jealous girls grow to like her, particularly when late at night she secretly tells them stories she has learned in India. The film, indeed, devotes a quite entertaining episode of Ali-Baba (W. E. Lawrence) and the den of thieves.

     The scenes that accompany her story are quite lovely and complex in their imagery, far beyond most of the films of the day in their cinematic quality.

     But we get glimpses of the cruelty of the two administrators in their treatment of a girl without parents who is unable to pay, Becky (an early performance by Zasu Pitts), who they treat virtually as a slave and who speaks, apparently, with a cockney accent.

     Celebrating her 10th birthday with chocolates and other treats paid for by the Minchins, news suddenly comes that not only has Sara’s father died, but did so with believing that his best friend, Mr. Carrisford (Gustav von Seyffertitz) defrauded him regarding a diamond mine, leaving him and his daughter penniless.

     Now Sara is moved to the attic and like Becky, who has become her best friend, treated as a slave, fed only small portions of the food that they must help prepare to cook. Although she basically remains in good spirits, entertaining that not so very imaginative Becky, she too increasingly grows hungry and depressed.

     One day, while in her room, she is suddenly visited by a monkey, and soon after an Indian servant, Ram Dass (George McDaniel) crawls her window to claim him. Becky has long wondered whether her friend’s imagination does not take her beyond reality, but now poor Sara wonders as well if she has begun to imagine things.

      In fact, her father’s former friend, Mr. Carrisford has moved into the building next door with his Indian servant. And Ram Dass has long been observing the sufferings of the sweet, golden-haired child—a bit questionable if you think of it as being a kind of voyeurism of older man concerning a young underage child, but evidently perceived as innocuous in the day.

      In any event, by Christmas the men have planned a surprised dinner for the two girls, setting up a special table replete with a full turkey, cranberry sauce, and potatoes as Sara and Becky clean the school and help to prepare the sumptuous Christmas dinner to which they will not be invited.

      Returning to their rooms at the end of the day, first Sara and then Becky cannot believe their eyes—or their noses—as they sit down to enjoy the miracle before them.

     At that very moment, Miss Minchin shows up, shocked and quite flabbergasted by what she sees, apparently accusing the girls having somehow stolen the dinner from her own pantry. Watching the event from across the way, the two kind gentlemen immediately cross the roof and intervene, scolding the boarding house harpy for her treatment of the girls. In seeing Ram Dass again, she suddenly reverts to one of her Indian phrases, and Mr. Carrisford, amazed at hearing the phrase demands to know her background. She explains that her father, Captain Crewe died and left her penniless. Carrisford is suddenly overjoyed, explaining that he has been long looking for her, making every attempt to find her whereabouts since he returned from a sickness to find her father dead, having wrongly believed that he had defrauded him. In fact, the mines resulted in more money than even expected, and “the little princess” is now a very wealthy woman.

     Taking both girls into his own house, Carrisford celebrates the holiday by permitting Sara to invite street boys to share her Christmas treats and gifts under the tree.

     Although the story is rather implausible and the plot filled with too many meandering events and genres, the work overall is so brilliantly handled that one has to imagine that it must have seemed to be one of the most advanced films of the day, particularly when compared with the far cruder pictures of the year such as Charlie Chaplin’s The Cure or Roscoe Arbuckle’s The Butcher—although some of the most important movies of that year such as J. Gordon Edwards’ Cleopatra with Theda Bara have been lost.

 

Los Angeles, December 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2022).