Reviews

(SPOILERS IN FIRST PARAGRAPH) This movie's anti-German sentiment seems painfully dated now, but it's a brilliant example of great war-time propaganda. It was made back when Cecil B. DeMille was still a great director. (Ignore all his later Best Picture Academy Awards; he never made a very good sound film.) This movie lacks the comedy of most of Pickford's other films, and really it was DeMille's movie, not Pickford's. The vilification of the Germans can be compared to the way "The Patriot" of 2000 did the same to the British. The only good German in the film was a reluctant villain who had the ironic name of Austreheim. They even had Pickford take an ill-fated trip on a luxury ship that gets torpedoed by a German submarine. So what'll get the Americans more stirred up to war? The sinking of the Lusitania, or watching America's favorite Canadian import sinking in it? All throughout the film DeMille runs his protagonist from one kind of horrible calamity to another, barely escaping death, hypothermia, depravity, rape, execution, and explosions that go off in just the right place to keep her unharmed. The way she is saved from a firing squad is no more believable than the way the humans in "Jurassic Park" were ultimately rescued from the velociraptors. If I was any more gullible to such propaganda I would punish myself for having a part-German ancestry.

Was it a good film? Aside from a humorous running gag about Americans abroad thinking they're untouchable – that was apparently a joke even back then – you might not be entertained. You'll find it more than a little melodramatic, and obviously one-sided, but the first thing that came to my mind after watching it is that it was years before Potemkin's false portrayal of a massacre revolutionized the language of cinema as well as a movie's potential for propaganda. It made me wonder: what became of Cecil B. DeMille? Somewhere between the advent of sound and "The Greatest Show on Earth" he seemed to lose his ambition. Ben Hur looked expensive, but not ambitious. In a sentence, this movie is for 1) Film historians, 2) Silent Film Buffs, 3) Mary Pickford fans, or 4) DeMille fans, if such a person exists.

"Suds" is one of Mary Pickford's funniest movies, and more so now, because most of the jokes in her other movies fall flat eight decades later.

The story sequence is my favorite part, which works on more than one level. On one hand, it's a way to sneak some escapism into a movie that's a little too depressingly honest about people. On the other hand, it's a hilarious spoof of period pieces. The costumes are from many places and many ages, and the story is the stuff of every fairy tale. The inter-titles are what make it more humorous, as the "characters," in all their costumed splendor, speak to each other with the same bad dialect as Amanda, who is narrating. There is that anachronistic shirt, worn by 'Orace. The story has the atmosphere of sixteenth century England, but Amanda's audience is to believe that it all ends up in a twentieth-century laundry.

The only down-side of the movie is its compromise at the end. The alternate happy endings aren't entirely dishonest or unbelievable, but it would have been braver to end it five minutes earlier with Amanda by herself.

"Suds" lacks a moral, I suppose, but that's better than having a bad moral, like the uneven messages about skin-deep beauty (and lack thereof) in "Stella Maris." It's also a nice break from those sickeningly perfect child characters that Pickford is more famous for.

It may not be Pickford's best movie, but it's definitely her cutest. I can't help but be a little biased, however: I always felt that her melodramas were a little too dated, and the ones that really last are these scantily plotted, silly comedies that don't take themselves too seriously.

It's priceless to see her "hold up" a stagecoach with a sling shot, or wonder what "-??-" means when put between "none of your" and "business." (They already showed a willingness to print "damn," so that narrows it down.)

The inter titles are funny, although in a silent film they don't have to be, and the supporting characters are just as fun to watch as Mary. It's on the "Heart o' the Hills" DVD that came out in '05 as only a special feature, but it's the more enjoyable of the two.