Mary Pickford and the Deevolution of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl

In his 2005 review of Cameron Crowe's Elizabethtown, The A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin coined a new term for an increasingly popular movie trope: the manic pixie dream girl.  The term is defined as "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."


Rabin first applied the moniker to Kirsten Dunst in that movie, but since then it has been applied to everyone from Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby to Tom Hanks as a male variant in Big.  In fact, one website has over 60 examples of this type of character.

But who was the first MPDG?


Mary Pickford flirted with elements of the trope in some of her previous work like Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but in Tess of Storm Country she's in full on MPDG mode.  Lloyd Hughes plays Frederick Graves, a disillusioned son whose idea of a good life is starkly different than his wealthy father.  He's rudderless however and will likely become exactly what his father wants.

Enter Mary Pickford's Tess.  She's everything he's not.  She's poor.  She's fiery.  She stands up to authority.  She randomly breaks into dancing. There's no reason for Frederick to fall for her.

Yet fall he does.  Hard.

By the end of the movie, he's stood up to his father and been able to become his own man.  He literally tells Tess that she is the source of his belief system.  She transforms him into the man he could become.

So, Mary Pickford's Tess is full of quirk and enters a relationship with a man that fundamentally changes his life for the better.  She also is the type of creature that only exists in the minds of Hollywood writers.  She is perfect in her imperfection.  She has delicate features yet doesn't bathe and throws a mean right hook.

The only part of the MPDG standard she does not quite satisfy is shallowness.  She is deeply committed to caring for her father and her village.  And she drops everything to care for a baby in danger of being abandoned.  Unlike the traditional MPDG, she is very self-aware and is truly in love with Frederick while never compromising her values.  She's more like Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  Like Clem, you can easily see Tess admonishing Frederick at the start of the film that she's not a concept and isn't there to save him; she's her own person, complete with flaws.

Still, in the world of the MPDG, Pickford is definitely one of the chains in the path's evolutionary path.  Or rather de-evolutionary path.  Pickford's oeuvre is clearly the forerunner of characters right up to Ramona Flowers.  Let's give credit where credit is due.

Tess of Storm Country (1922)

Directed by John S. Robertson
Starring Mary Pickford, Lloyd Hughes and Gloria Hope
Produced by Mary Pickford Company

Imagine you've bought your dream home.  It's a literal mansion, a palatial estate sitting atop a hill with a water view. The perfect place to live out your years with your daughter and son...

...except for those pesky squatters living at the base of your property, ruining your view and acting in a wholly uncivilized manner.

You've tried legal means to get rid of the lower class, but the squatters have rights.  Fortunately, you have an ambitious would-be son-in-law who realizes the vagabonds are fishing illegally.  A call to the local police who collects all the shantytown's fishing nets and the people starve.  Problem solved, right?

Wrong.  See, numbered amongst the poor people is Tess Skinner. Not only is she clever enough to hide her daddy's net, but she also wins the heart of your own son.  The nerve of the girl!  When her father and some of the village's other denizens are caught with the net while fishing, your future son-in-law is shot and killed.  Will Daddy Skinner hang for the crime?  Will Tess bring everyone together in the end (hint: she's played by Mary Pickford)?  Will Tess end up with the rich man's son (hint: again, Pickford)?  And what's this about a baby?

Melodrama is one of the hardest forms of entertainment to pull off.  Stuff always needs to be happening, obstacles need to constantly appear and be overcome, but the audience has to care about the characters.

For me, Tess of Storm Country was a little too much mellow, and not enough drama.

Oh, don't get me wrong. There are certainly huge stakes here, but at times the story lingers a bit too long in one place. Personally, for the first half of the film, I just didn't get a real sense of drama.  The plot about the nets being taken felt contrived with our lead actress acting in a bizarre way. After she has successfully hidden her family's net (or so she thinks), she aggressively tries to protect another family's net.  Everyone knows the way that conflict will play out, but the movie seems to spend a lot of time with Tess defending that net.

The drama in the second half is better, but it hangs on a decision by Tess that makes no sense.  SPOILERS AHEAD.  The daughter of the wealthy landlord finds herself pregnant by her now deceased fiance.  Rather than deal with the shame of having a child out of wedlock, she convinces Tess to take the child.  When her brother (who is smitten with Tess) returns from college, he is outraged that Tess now has a child.

This entirely plot is built upon the premise that Tess would have any reason to help a woman she previously hated.  There is no explanation given.  When it threatens her potential shot at love, she still acquiesces to a woman she has no reason to cross the street for.  It makes no sense.

From here the movie downshifts without a clutch.  By the way, the baby (who ten seconds was fine and cute and making the audience go awwww!) is now dying.  And when I say dying, I mean "get him to the church to be baptized right now before he dies" dying.  You need connecting pieces to all of these scenes so the audience believes what is happening on screen.  As shot, it all simply feels like an exercise in moving from plot point to plot point.

The other major point against this for me was the colloquial dialogue on the title cards.  A lot of "kin" instead of "can", "aire" instead of "are" and "dum" instead of... well, this is a family blog.  We get it.  They don't speak proper English.  Stop beating me over the head with it.

The acting is good, but I don't think anyone is great. Pickford is very... well, Pickford.  It's the type of role she always plays.  In fact, she played this exact same role eight year earlier.

Some of the camera work and editing is brilliant. The scenes in the snow are particularly vivid and beautiful.

All in all, Tess comes across as having both too much story and not enough.  There are a lot of twists and turns, but little to connect each together.  It slows to a crawl when it should be humming along, and skips over moments that required a little time and attention.

** out of *****

Robin Hood (1922)

Robin Hood enjoying a brew

Directed by Allan Dwan
Starring Douglas Fairbanks, Wallace Beery and Sam De Grasse
Produced by Douglas Fairbanks Pictures

The crowd waits anxiously as the joust is set to begin.  King Richard offers his brother Prince John a friendly wager on the outcome.  Richard is backing the heroic Robin Hood... er, Earl of Huntingdon.  John's man is the lecherous Sir Guy of Gisbourne.  It does not matter that Sir Guy straps himself to his saddle; our hero quickly dismounts him and wins the prize...

...which he must accept from Lady Marian.  Now, that is a problem because Robin... sorry, the Earl of Huntingdon is afraid of women.  So, as various maidens approach him following the contest, he races from them terrified, seeking refuge by jumping into the castle's moat.


Later that night, the king is hosting a fare thee well party as he and his troops prepare to head off to the Crusades.  The king admonishes Rob... grrr, the Earl of Huntingdon for not having a woman to come back to.  Conveniently, our hero sees Prince John and Sir Guy start aggressively hitting on Marian and Huntingdon makes the save.  The guy who was afraid of women is now smitten.

Soon Richard is off to war with Huntingdon and Sir Guy in tow, leaving Prince John to run the kingdom.  Little does the king know that his brother has plotted with Sir Guy to kill the king and make John the ruler permanently.  Prince John is not waiting for that however.  He's taxing everything he sees and grinding his foes beneath his boot heels.

Marian gets a message to Robin...DAMMIT, the Earl of Huntingdon about the situation in England. Huntingdon comes up with an excuse to return to his homeland to mount an opposition against the prince.  Soon, word spreads of a robber knight named Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest and common men flock to his side to take on the army of Prince John.  Will Richard be able to satisfy his brother's assassination attempt?  And if he does, can Robin Hood hold out long enough to give the king a country to rule?

Okay, first, an acknowledgment.  The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is one of my favorite movies.  Ever.  It's movie perfection for me.  The performances, action... it's just perfect.

So, I come into any retelling with a bias.  That said, half of Robin Hood is a fantastic telling of the tale, complete with lavish sets and large action set pieces.  The other half?  Dull and nonsensical.  And unfortunately, those two halves collide to give you a bit of a mess.

The opening scene with the joust should be thrilling, but it's just boring.  It serves to introduce the main players. but it is just monotonous to watch.  We also are shown that our hero Huntingdon is terrified of women.  He is literally running from them after winning the joust.  I get the comedy they are trying to go for here, but it really undercuts my view of the hero when he's behaving like a child.

The movie then crawls into the party and the political intrigue of what is happening in England and with Richard's war party.  Unless you get really excited about people writing letters, this is slow.  This is the first hour of the movie.

The movie picks up when Huntingdon leaves Richard to wage a campaign against Prince John.  Huntingdon becomes Robin Hood and the movie starts humming.  There are some good battles with the army leading up to the climactic battle between Huntingdon and Sir Guy.  The end of the fight is actually pretty brutal considering the time period but I thought it fit well.

There are a lot of inconsistencies that bugged me.  Huntingdon goes from battle-hardened warrior to prancing around in tights as Robin Hood.  It's hard to reconcile his transformation into Peter Pan (complete with that legs apart-hands on hips pose).  The Merry Men get no exposition.  We are introduced to familiar names like Will Scarlett and Friar Tuck with no sense of who they are or how they got there.  Little John fares slightly better only because in this version, he spends the first hour as Huntingdon's squire.

Robin Hood also wants to pretend it's a mystery who Robin Hood is, and then who the mysterious new Merry Man in armor is.  The former is very obviously Huntingdon and the latter is obvious, but I will not spoil it.

Amazing sets

The sets here are lavish and really bring the world of Robin Hood to life.  The castle set was so large I assumed it was a painting until the cast started walking up the stairs.  Robin Hood's lair in the forest is great, with a tree filled with arrows fired by each of the Merry Men.

Fairbanks is... Fairbanks.  He's a physically agile hero with a bit of a comedic streak who (of course) gets the girl.  He's fine in this role, though I still prefer his Zorro.  The rest of the cast is good.  However, Wallace Beery as Richard is... different.  You expect the king character to be serious.  Beery is as much the prankster as Fairbanks in his role.  It works for the most part, but his jovial take on the character also undercuts the gravity of the movie's endgame.

The film ultimately takes too long to get to Robin Hood's story and that would be okay if it had something interesting to say.  Sadly, it doesn't.  What's left is half a good film and half a meh film.

*** out of *****

Photo from The Bioscope and Gone Movie