The Toronto International Film Festival need not be solely about the new and the different, in other words the future of movies. Nay, it can also be about cinema’s wondrous past as demonstrated with a Saturday morning screening of William Beaudine’s Sparrows starring one of Canada’s earliest exports to Hollywood: Mary Pickford. Pickford is an important figure, not just as one of the first name actresses to emerge in Hollywood, but for her work in helping to establish artist-run avenues like the studio United Artists, which she co-founded with Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin.
Sparrows was released in 1926 to generally favourable reviews, and was another in a long line of praise worthy performances by Pickford. This silent film has since been selected for preservation by the Library of Congress, from whom the Festival received Saturday’s print. Renowned pianist and composer Gabriel Thibaudeau played musical accompaniment live, which combined with the elegant setting of the Elgin Winter Garden produced an affect that was probably as close as I’m ever going to get to recreating the cinema experience of those seeing Sparrows for the first time in the 1920s.
The film itself combines Dickensian social commentary with German Expressionism. The film can occasionally be bleak, but at its heart it is also funny and endearing. Pickford plays Molly, the eldest of a bunch of orphans seemingly kept as slave labour by the evil Mr. Grimes played by Gustav von Seyffertitz, looking not unlike Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera, released the previous year. Mr. Grimes and several cohorts kidnap the daughter of a wealthy family and bring the child to Grimes farm in the middle of the swamp and await the chance to make a ransom demand. The child is left in Molly’s care, and she immediately takes to the kidnapped toddler. But as the police close in, Grimes decides to “put the child in the bog” and cut his losses, which forces Molly and the kids to attempt a harrowing escape through the alligator infested swamp.
Harrowing is just the right word to describe the final chase in the film as Mr. Grimes and gang chase the kids as the bad guys themselves are chased by the cops. Yes, those were real alligators, if you wanted to know. Beaudine was big on realism apparently, so much so that he and Pickford got in a fight about the ethical concerns about carrying a two-year-old through a gator-filled set. In the end much of the movie creates a bizarre balance between some serious melodrama and several light-hearted moments. After climbing over a fallen tree to stay above the ravenous gators, and returning to dry land, Molly makes the kids stop and give thanks to God for see them over trouble waters. It was a great comedic moment that cut the tension of an anxious scene.
Beaudine shows himself an adapt master of emotion. In one scene, Molly tends to a sickly baby when the nearby wall dissolves into a grass meadow, and man who’s obviously Jesus walks into the barn and collects the baby from Molly’s arms to take it to heaven. It’s a beautiful scene that makes me misty just thinking about it, and that says a great deal about the sheer power of the image on it’s own to provoke emotion. As a complete film, Sparrows is powerful capable of mixing joy and pathos in equal measure. It ends in a typically Hollywood fashion with the kidnapped girl recovered but already having become attached to her “Mama Molly” in such a short time. The father then asks Molly to be the child’s permanent caretaker, but Molly won’t leave her other charges. The man, naturally, offers all of Mr. Grimes former child labour force a home under his roof. All’s well that ends well, I guess, and despite modern cynicism you still want to let Hollywood have its happy ending on this one.
