Here’s proof – as if any were needed – that Hollywood has been hooked on remakes from pretty much the beginning. This 1915 Mary Pickford film is a feature-length version of a one-reel short from 1912 starring Italian-born Vivian Prescott, whose 200+ appearances between 1911 and 1915 rival Pickford’s own record. (As a further note on the subject, years later Fox considered remaking it with Shirley Temple.)
The silent drama and its predecessor are based on the 1849 novel by French writer and gender nonconformist George Sand (the pen name of Amantine Dupin). It tells the story of a wild young girl who lives in the forest with her eccentric grandmother, a suspected sorceress, and her love for the boy she rescues from drowning.
The picture was filmed in the wilds of New Jersey at the Delaware Water Gap area. Its director, James Kirkwood, was one of the most prolific filmmakers of the period, with 80 releases to his credit within less than a decade. He was better known as an actor, making close to 250 appearances on film and television between his debut in D.W. Griffith’s Edgar Allan Poe (1909) and an uncredited role in John Ford’s Western Two Rode Together (1961).
The scenario was written by Kirkwood and Frances Marion, the film pioneer whose long career, beginning in 1912 and lasting through the 1940s, cemented her status at the top of her profession. An Academy Award winner for The Big House (1930) and The Champ (1931), she also wrote the screenplay for the classic Dinner at Eight (1933), a credit she shares with Herman Mankiewicz. This was her second time writing for the screen, albeit uncredited, following the Mary Pickford short The New York Hat (1912). She and Pickford were close friends.
The diminutive Pickford was already a veteran of six years and dozens of pictures at this point, still playing the young girl at 23, although earlier in the year she had grown up a bit playing King Charles II’s mistress Nell Gwynne in another Kirkwood-directed film. In fact, she was directed by him in 10 pictures, and they appeared on screen together in about three dozen films directed by D.W. Griffith.
Actually, this isn’t just a Mary Pickford picture. It’s the only film in which the three Pickford siblings, including sister Lottie and brother Jack, appeared in together. Unlike their older sister, who was one of the greatest stars of her time, a respected and stable presence in the motion picture community and a noteworthy movie mogul as one of the founders of United Artists, Lottie and Jack were more interested in the good times fame and fortune could bring them. Both led lives of multiple marriages and wild partying (reportedly with drugs, alcohol and scandalous sexual activities), and each died at a young age (she 43, he 33) of ill health brought on by chronic alcoholism.
Upon its release, Variety called Fanchon, the Cricket “tiresome” and “decidedly weak,” but the discovery and restoration of what was once thought to be this “lost” film was a cause for celebration by film buffs and historians.
In 2012, the Mary Pickford Foundation learned that the Cinémathèque Française had a copy of Fanchon. The two organizations, along with the British Film Institute, which owned an incomplete and volatile nitrate print, collaborated over the course of the next six years to have it restored. The Imagine Ritrovata in Bologna, Italy, brought the film back to standard through photochemical processes and scanned it into 4K high definition. (Source: Lara Fowler, Backlots blog, January 7, 2019)
In addition to watching the beautiful restoration, here’s a fun activity: See if you can spot a very young and uncredited Milton Berle in the cast. His participation has been rumored but unconfirmed.
Director: James Kirkwood
Scenario: James Kirkwood, Frances Marion (uncredited), based on a novel by George Sand
Cinematography: Edward Wynard
Cast: Mary Pickford (Fanchon), Jack Standing (Landry Barbeau), Lottie Pickford (Madelon), Gertrude Norman (Old Fadette), Russell Bassett (Landry’s father)
By Rob Nixon
