Educational Media Reviews Online

This documentary tries to do too much. Primarily, it wants to chart Frances Marion’s life from her late teens to her death at age 84, focusing particularly upon her hugely successful career as screenwriter and sometime director in Hollywood from 1915 to 1939. But it also wants to pay homage to other successful female writers and actors in Hollywood from the same period, establish a dialogue among current female writers and directors that ranges over several topics (the writing process, their thoughts on Marion’s life and career, the challenges of working in a male-dominated industry), and argue the importance of friendship to women and their careers, using Marion as a case in point (Marion received a helping hand early in her career from friend Mary Pickford and ‘paid it forward’ several times over by creating roles for her actress friends who had fallen upon hard times). The result is a disjointed film that jumps from topic to topic, none of them covered to satisfactory depth, loosely held together by the chronology of Marion’s life.

The film also suffers from jarring shifts in tense: the many interviewees frame their comments in the past tense, but the film’s narration is delivered in the present tense, a choice that creates an awkward listening experience. Technical quality is otherwise good. The documentary includes plenty of film clips from the silent era, and they’re generally in great shape.

The most disappointing aspect of the film is its refusal to explain, or even attempt to explain, the source of Marion’s great success as a screenwriter. As the video sleeve asserts, “[f]rom 1915-1939, Frances Marion […] wrote more than 200 movies and was the world’s highest paid screenwriter -- man or woman.” Marion won two Oscars for her screenplays and, according to this documentary, was dubbed the “queen of adaptation.” The film does little to explain what it was about Marion’s screenplays or her skills at literary adaptation that allowed her to remain so powerful for so long. The film offers one short scene reading from The Scarlet Letter (1926) to illustrate Marion’s reliance upon detailed stage directions in her silent screenplays. It reports that for her first Oscar-winning screenplay (The Big House, 1930), Marion conducted background research at San Quentin State Prison. Marion’s former secretary informs us that the writer rose early and worked long hours. And we are told, with short clips from The Champ (1931) to provide meager evidence, that Marion wrote believable dialogue (the film’s best attempt to explain her successful transition from silent film to sound) and was good at writing about relationships. The viewer, looking for explanation, is left with unanswered questions.

The videotape of this documentary also includes a full-length feature film, A Little Princess (1917, silent, b&, 62 mins.), adapted by Marion from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s story and starring Mary Pickford. Here, also, the viewer finds confusion and disappointment. The documentary points the viewer toward several of Marion’s more significant films -- The Love Light, which Marion wrote and directed; The Scarlet Letter; The Big House; The Champ; Anna Christie (Garbo talks!) -- but A Little Princess isn’t among them. There is no explanation, either on the tape or on the video sleeve, for why this film is a good example of Marion’s screenwriting and the viewer realizes, while watching Princess, that the preceding documentary has done little to prepare him or her for an appreciation of Marion’s work. Also, this print of Princess imposes a too-narrow frame upon the original print, cutting off action to the left of the screen and making several of the intertitles impossible to read.

I would not recommend this documentary to any library wishing simply to expand its film studies collection. I would, however, recommend this documentary with reservations to any library with a biography or women’s studies collection: the film provides a loving review of Marion’s long and adventurous life, based upon co-writer/producer Cari Beauchamp’s own award-winning biography of similar title and moderately contextualized in the events of Marion’s day, and it points the curious student toward several other important female filmmakers, past and present.