At age 33, Mary Pickford had reigned for a decade as Hollywood's most popular and powerful actress, enjoying unprecedented control over her productions. Often portraying children or teens, Pickford's "sweetheart" persona proved adaptable to innumerable scenarios; Sparrows, her penultimate silent starrer, found her cuteness anchoring a dark Southern Gothic tale. Here, in a scenario to rival Dickens at his most cartoonish, Mary plays Molly, the mother figure at a "baby farm" in the deep South, where the demented Mr. Grimes keeps as prisoners a gaggle of plucky tots. To keep their spirits up, Molly teaches them half-remembered Bible stories and sends out an occasional kite-string SOS to the world beyond the high fence. The film's tone is operatic and moralizing (at one point Jesus himself makes an appearance!), yet it's also a breathtaking monument of popular entertainment and a marvel of "total" art direction — a live oak swamp, infested with alligators and bubbling quicksand, was constructed from scratch on the West Hollywood backlot of Pickford-Fairbanks Studios. A contemporary review in Picture Play captured the joy of surrendering to the film: "So heavily does the hand of melodrama smite 'Sparrows' that the picture passes beyond the bounds of credibility. Thus the spectator relaxes, content to give way to his amazement at Mary's skill." (Text courtesy of Chicago Film Society)

35mm from the Library of Congress

Preceded by: Trailer for Sparrows (1926) – 3 min – 35mm from the Library of Congress