Seeing America's Sweetheart Mary Pickford riding with the Ku Klux Klan is strange and unsettling and is in stark contrast to an otherwise pleasant and ordinary silent film. Yet, the KKK is featured in only one episode of this episodic picture, "The Heat o' the Hills". In the film, they are referred to as "night-riders" (a common euphemism for the Klan), and there's no racism included otherwise. The absence of the pointed top from their masks in the film may've been another attempt by the filmmakers to distance the picture from the white-supremacist terrorist organization while remaining faithful to the novel from which the film is based.
On the other hand, this was 1919, and the story is set in rural Kentucky. It was only five years since D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" featured the racist depiction of the KKK saving a Southern community from rapacious freed slaves. Griffith's film largely inspired the revival of the Klan, which theretofore had been suppressed since the Reconstruction era. "The Heart o' the Hills" contains no such racism. Pickford and her fellow Klansmen do, however, take to a night ride to intimidate the "other", which in this case are developers who intend through illegal means to take the locals' lands for exploitation of coal and timbre.
The struggle of preserving a traditional community against the progress of the outside forces of modern society and industry has been a common theme in literature and cinema. Mary Pickford's character finding when to fight against the outside and, ultimately, a balance between the two as she comes of age is what concerns the entire film. It's a pleasant story, if unexceptional and episodic (which is surely a product of being a literary adaptation).
Nevertheless, the subplot of the father's murder could've been dropped and, otherwise, telling it in flashback wasn't ideal. The transitional art titles are nice, but the colloquialisms and the censoring of curse words ("h--l" instead of "hell") can be too much. The film is also musically challenged. The Milestone DVD score is sometimes annoying, and the film itself features a barn dance with some of the worst dancing I've ever seen. Although the story is set in Kentucky, the San Bernardino Mountains of California where the production was actually made is picturesque, and Charles Rosher's camera captured that well. At the very least, "The Heart o' the Hills" is a well-made production from 1919 with interesting subject matter.
On the other hand, this was 1919, and the story is set in rural Kentucky. It was only five years since D.W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation" featured the racist depiction of the KKK saving a Southern community from rapacious freed slaves. Griffith's film largely inspired the revival of the Klan, which theretofore had been suppressed since the Reconstruction era. "The Heart o' the Hills" contains no such racism. Pickford and her fellow Klansmen do, however, take to a night ride to intimidate the "other", which in this case are developers who intend through illegal means to take the locals' lands for exploitation of coal and timbre.
The struggle of preserving a traditional community against the progress of the outside forces of modern society and industry has been a common theme in literature and cinema. Mary Pickford's character finding when to fight against the outside and, ultimately, a balance between the two as she comes of age is what concerns the entire film. It's a pleasant story, if unexceptional and episodic (which is surely a product of being a literary adaptation).
Nevertheless, the subplot of the father's murder could've been dropped and, otherwise, telling it in flashback wasn't ideal. The transitional art titles are nice, but the colloquialisms and the censoring of curse words ("h--l" instead of "hell") can be too much. The film is also musically challenged. The Milestone DVD score is sometimes annoying, and the film itself features a barn dance with some of the worst dancing I've ever seen. Although the story is set in Kentucky, the San Bernardino Mountains of California where the production was actually made is picturesque, and Charles Rosher's camera captured that well. At the very least, "The Heart o' the Hills" is a well-made production from 1919 with interesting subject matter.