Mary, Marty, Larry

I got around to watching “Sparrows”, starring Mary Pickford, on an evening last week. It was my first Mary Pickford movie and I must say that I found it excellent; a beautifully photographed and captivating thriller where a villainous family run an hideous baby farm in the swamps from which Mary must help the maltreated children escape. There were alligators and quickmud quagmires and even a vicious dog with a continually wagging tale that dispelled any illusion that it was in any way actually vicious. But that’s okay, it was an enjoyable movie.

I had never felt particularly inspired to watch “Little Mary”, as she was known contemporarily, because her real-life personality put me off somewhat; she was politically right-wing and I know what Chaplin meant when he said in his “My Autobiography” that her business and legal acumen saddened him. I was aware of the flaw in this attitude of mine, for a person’s real-life silliness does not necessarily preclude an ability to be appealing as a performer (although, I have never been able to enjoy John Wayne in any respect - to me, the Duke is a Dork), and hence it only put me off somewhat. I found hers to be quite an appealing on-screen personality, so now the affection she elicited of silent cinema scholars like Edward Wagenknecht and Kevin Brownlow makes a bit more sense to me than it did.

I highly recommend this classic 1926 film. Yes, I do!

A quick word on the print I viewed: This was one released by ‘Kino On Video’ on videotape. The picture quality was quite good, although not excellent; it had a somewhat muted and contrasty picture that leads me to suspect that it was not transferred from an original negative. Plus, having been manufactured in the U.S.A., the tape was in the N.T.S.C. rather than PAL format and that will, of course, always diminish pictorial quality.

… Recently I also watched the complete third season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm”, Larry David’s already-classic TV show. Martin Scorsese was one of the guest performers (as himself, of course) and was amusing. Oddly enough, I don’t recall noticing his eyebrows during these shenanigans. His eyebrows were always the most unwieldy I can ever recall having seen on an human being but perhaps he finally decided to trim them for this stint in front of the camera. Hmm…