Sparrows

Sparrows (1926, William Beaudine) is a Mary Pickford vehicle cunningly engineered by its star to deliver maximum entertainment to the most people.  The film is the silent equivalent of a blockbuster like Avengers:  Endgame -- not exactly art, but supremely artful, a manipulative, revved-up machine that yields about one memorable bit every minute and climaxes in an action sequence (a pursuit through a swamp) that a thousand later films have imitated for better or worse.  If you could think about this film while watching it, you might find yourself hopelessly conflicted -- the picture exploits the audience mercilessly displaying toddlers in mortal danger while pausing, now and then, for exhibitions of stunningly mawkish religious sentimentality.  But you didn't get to think while watching a movie like this -- it's one damn thing after another.

It's not ironic, but, rather, somewhat appropriate, that an full-throated and hysterical exploitation film is, itself, about exploitation.  Grimes, a vicious old cripple, operates a so-called "baby farm" in the heart of a lethal southern swamp.  (Although the setting is never established with any precision, the place involves moss-draped willows, quicksand, ante-bellum mansions, and black lagoons full of alligators -- presumably, this is supposed to be Louisiana.)  A "baby farm" doesn't produce babies -- in fact, its victims are unwanted children, orphans or infants given up by their mothers, or, even, kidnapped.  The babies work on the farm, weeding vegetables under the supervision of Grimes, his slatternly wife, and Ambrose, the proverbial red-headed stepson, a gruesome-looking freckle-faced teenager who acts as the infant concentration camp's Capo.  The farm itself is pictorially defined in all its impressive squalor -- it sits on a islet surrounded by moats of loathsome-looking mud percolating with methane bubbles and has a stockade, a willow tree, a tumble-down house and a ramshackle barn.  "Hawgs" are for sale and, when visitors arrive, Grimes or his wife ring a bell signaling that the wretched orphans, barefoot and clad in rags, must scramble into the hayloft to avoid being seen.  There are ten children working the farm, including "Mama Molly", a teenage waif played by Mary Pickford. The children are systematically starved and worked to death.  And there's a sick baby in the group as well.  In the film's first scene, the waifs are flying a kite to which they have attached a message, something to the effect of "Come and Save Us!".  But the kite gets caught in a tree and the brutalization of the children continues.  (The title Sparrows refers to a leit motif:  the Gospels tell us that God's eye is on the sparrow and that not one of them, sold two for a penny, is beyond His love -- and, so, why is God so conspicuously absent from this hellish acreage on which innocent children are mercilessly exploited?  Indeed, for the first third of the film, the movie seems to pose a significant, if imponderable question:  why does God allow children to suffer?  Of course, this question has confounded far greater minds than Mary Pickford's -- Dostoevsky for example -- and the film's apparent solution to the quandary is not particularly persuasive:  God likes perfect things and since the swamp and Grimes' "Baby Farm" are perfectly evil, God allows them to abide out of professional respect for the Devil's craftsmanship.)  Mary Pickford, who controlled all of her pictures made for Universal Artists with an iron-fist, never lets the horror overwhelm the entertainment value of the picture -- an error, in her eyes, that would be pretentious and counter-productive.  And, so, she interlards the grim proceedings with shots of cute kids and animals as well as surprising amounts of slapstick comedy.  The little kids are resourceful and have the ability, although limited to fight back -- they torment the vicious Ambrose.  Molly reads them Bible stories and they pray together for God's deliverance in scenes of such sentimental extravagance that have to be seen to be believed.   The kids get punished for stealing potatoes and Molly tries vainly to feed the baby some sort of gruel through a discarded whiskey flask equipped with a nipple made from the finger tip of a rubber glove.  Cradling the sick baby, Molly dreams that the wretched wall of the prison barn  has become a green pasture where Jesus is watching his flock.  The Good Shepherd steps out of the picture-book meadow and takes the baby from Molly, withdrawing into the Sunday School image.  When Molly wakes up, of course, the baby is dead.  But life goes on:  in the next scene, there's slapstick comedy about Molly giving the surviving children a bath in what seems to be a mud puddle.  Throughout the film's first half, Pickford and Beaudine carefully manage the quotient of horror to comedy -- when it gets so grim as to be painful, they insert some comic high-jinx involving the spunky waifs.

The second half of the film is essentially a chase thriller.  Grimes errs by accepting the kidnapped child of a wealthy man who lives alone in a vast plantation-style mansion.  Search parties comb the swamp.  A little boy who stutters (disability was often the source of comedy in old movies), Splutters, has been sold to neighboring farmer for "hav the price of a hawg".  The posse finds Splutters and he tells them about Grimes' baby farm.  Meanwhile, Molly gets into a fight with the bully Ambrose -- in a startling scene, she repeatedly puts her head down and butts him like billy-goat.  This leads to reprisals and, when Grimes finds out that the dragnet is closing in on him, he decides to throw the rich man's toddler into the quicksand.  Molly learns about this from the injured Ambrose and, then, besieged in the barn, builds a causeway of hay bales and miscellaneous junk across the quicksand moat.  Leading the eight children and with the toddler tied to her back, Molly flees through the perils of the swamp -- they are pursued by savage dogs, have to cross quicksand pits by wriggling single file across narrow, fragile tree limbs, contrive a swing to leap across a pond, and, finally, creep over an abyss that is chock-full of fat, angry-looking alligators.  There are gun battles and, even, a ship pursuit across a harbor with the coast guard firing shells at the little skiff where Molly and the kids are hiding out with a couple of gangsters.  Of course, all's well that ends well.  Molly and the waifs end up as a well-dressed choir singing "Shall we Gather at the River" in the rich man's mansion. 

The film is not without weird defects, although these failings don't detract from the movie's raw energy.  Mary Pickford was 33 when the film was made -- she plays a strangely asexual 14 year old girl in the film.  (David Thomson says that Pickford's cameraman, Charles Rosher, developed new and intricate lighting effects to make Pickford look younger than her real age.)  Pickford was apparently tiny -- some of the toddlers tower over her -- and she has a weird-looking body:  she seems to be some kind of dwarf or midget in the film.  In several scenes with Grimes' slatternly wife, a broad-faced, high-cheeked woman who looks either mostly Swedish or half-Cherokee, the lighting isn't effective in concealing Pickford's age and she seems actually older and more care-worn than the villainess.  The film is also oddly celibate -- there's not the slightest hint of any kind of sexual tension between anyone:  I suppose Pickford made the sensible decision to eschew sexual exploitation or rape as one of the implied horrors of the 'baby farm' -- that material, I'm guessing, would have been a "bridge too far."  On the other hand, a director like Griffith wouldn't have hesitated to mine this lurid material for sexual content and would have, certainly, staged rape or attempted rape scenes involving his leading lady.  Pickford and Beaudine don't take the film in that direction which is somewhat surprising given the horrific nature of the movie's subject.  In fact, unlike the uncannily chaste Gish sisters, who seem often to be threatened with rape, Mary Pickford is never presented as the object of anyone's desire and, in fact, she seems downright odd looking.  Grimes is played by Gustav von Seyffertitz (a great name) and he is genuinely frightening, a figure in black with a crooked body and crooked-looking jaw and a crooked walk.   The actress who plays Grimes' beaten down wife is also excellent -- we keep expecting her to show some sympathy for the oppressed children but she never does.  The film is most marred, in my view, by Pickford's performance:  she does little dances to amuse the kids (we are not amused), rolls her eyes to heaven repeatedly imploring God's aid, and, when frightened, runs around in little prancing circles signifying that she doesn't know what to do -- this trick is something she learned from Lillian Gish who uses the device sparingly in Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919).  Pickford does this about 6 times in the move -- and it's five times too many.  In the midst of spectacular chase, Molly doesn't hesitate to call a recess in the frenzied action and have the children kneel on the banks of noisome swamp to give praise to God for their deliverance.  Maybe this impressed someone in the audience in 1926, although I suppose most people had my response:  you want to strangle someone.