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 *****
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