‘Daddy Long Legs’ Showcases Pickford’s Timeless Artistry

With the enchanting “Daddy Long Legs” (1919), the Silent Movie continues its important rediscovery of Mary Pickford pictures. With each of these revivals it becomes clear that Pickford was not only the movies’ first major female star, but a major artist as well. Indeed, George Cukor, who never got to direct her, always declared that she was a great actress.

America’s Sweetheart, the eternal child-woman, is so often regarded as synonymous with sentimentality, yet her formidable, subtle gifts of mime and her sheer expressiveness reveal her as a brave, kindly fighter against all manner of adversity. Silent movies are blunt about life’s harshness and injustices, and their heroes and heroines tend to be uncomplainingly self-reliant.

*

In “Daddy Long Legs,” adapted from the Jean Webster novel and play, Pickford is a spunky 12-year-old in a relentlessly grim orphanage whose irrepressible spirits cheer the younger children and keep her from succumbing to despair; the place is so absurdly severe that Pickford’s response is to laugh at its Draconian policies and to cherish and protect those more vulnerable than she. Surely, her gifts for comedy and pathos here are the equal of Chaplin’s.

Years pass, and a Lord Bountiful, who wishes to remain anonymous, sends Pickford off to college and thus thrusts her from an environment where good and evil are sharply defined into an infinitely more sophisticated and complex new world, where she is pursued by a likable but wet-behind-the-ears Princeton freshman (Marshall Neilan, the film’s expert director) and a snobby classmate’s elegant uncle (Mahlon Hamilton), who fears he’s too old for her. What makes “Daddy Long Legs” so special is the way in which Pickford evolves from courageous cut-up to gracious and poised young woman. “Daddy Long Legs” will screen Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. along with two Pickford shorts. (213) 653-2389.

Lars von Trier’s 1984 “The Element of Crime,” which will play at the Sunset 5 on Fridays and Saturdays at midnight and Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m., is a compelling visual stunner from the Danish surrealist. It’s an anti-thriller, set in an ultra-derelict future in which a policeman (Michael Elphick) becomes obsessed on tracking down a serial child killer who strikes according to a geometric pattern across a desolate land. (Note: Von Trier’s monumental new work “The Kingdom,” set in a Copenhagen hospital, continues through Nov. 23 at the Nuart.) (213) 848-3500.

Dutch director Marleen Gorris has said of her remarkable family chronicle, “Antonia’s Line”: “The women in the film are thoroughly themselves and not defined through their roles as wife, mother or daughter. Of course, the film is a fairy tale.”

*

But what a fairy tale, exuberantly made flesh-and-blood! Gorris celebrates the eternal cycle of life and death and the paradoxical giving-and-taking role time plays within that cycle, and imagines the rich possibilities that life affords women when they are truly in charge of their own destinies. Spanning roughly a half-century from the end of World War II, the film is the saga of a sturdy, independent farm woman, Antonia (Willeke van Ammelrooy), and her descendants--all female free-thinkers, right down to her pretty little great-granddaughter.

Gorris’ women defy the stifling conventions of organized religion and society, embrace their souls, stand up to evil and extend a welcoming hand to friends and neighbors. By the time this beautiful, magical film is over, Gorris has quietly and resoundingly made her point: the more women are free to fulfill themselves the more men are too. “Antonia’s Line,” which the UCLA Film Archive will present Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Melnitz Theater, will be followed by another Dutch film, Frans Weisz’s “Last Call,” about a 78-year-old actor who is given a final chance to redeem a lackluster career.

(Note: The UCLA Film Archives’ “Hungarian Rhapsodies,” a series of recent Hungarian films, continues at Melnitz Theater, Thursday and Sunday.) (310) 206-8588.