Educational Media Reviews Online

With their Suds DVD, a restoration by the Mary Pickford Institute and Timeline Films, Milestone Film & Video has produced an impressive research tool. This DVD is being released along with two other Mary Pickford films available on DVD. (The others, Heart o’ the Hills and Through the Back Door are also reviewed on this site.)

Pickford selected John Francis Dillon to direct her in a story adapted from the 1905 English one-act play that brought Maude Adams to international fame. The film was released June 27, 1920. Cinematographer Charles Rosher lit the laundry interiors creating a sense of depth and 3-dimentionality rarely found in films of this period. The film even includes a charming scene of a shirt’s fantasy movement through stop-motion animation and some special effects with flies on Mary’s leg. Pickford moves away from her standard image and makes herself as unattractive as she can by not wearing lipstick, unevenly darkening her eyebrows, and keeping her jaw clenched. Her signature golden curls are replaced by unkempt pinned-back hair yet she retains the strength of character and good nature found in all her roles from this period.

Comic scenes detail the grimy lives of laundresses. They are shown toiling in a French hand laundry over boiling cauldrons and washboards. The only thing that keeps Mary going is her good humor and her overactive romantic imagination as her infatuation with a man who left his shirt to be washed six months earlier increases. She saves the laundry’s delivery horse from the glue factory and brings him home to her second-floor flat. A beautifully executed scene opens with a closeup of lovely blond ringlets being curled only to reveal that they are not Mary’s but the makeover Mary performed on the horse! The joke was surely not lost on audiences and the horse used in this film ended up with painted-on ribs as he was too pampered in Douglas Fairbanks’ stable during the film and stopped looking downtrodden. Pickford married Fairbanks during the production of Suds.

The disc provides the domestic release version of the film from the Library of Congress’ 16mm print with a lovely score by the Mount Alto Orchestra and as a bonus, the 67-minute foreign release of the film with a classic organ score by Gaylord Carter. There is also an alternate happy ending, a short side-by-side comparison of the domestic and foreign release which is an excellent teaching tool for film history courses. Rounding out the many bonuses, is a plentiful stills gallery and the 26-minute 1966 Matty Kemp documentary on Pickford and Fairbanks, The Birth of a Legend which uses film clips and archival newsreel footage to compare the Pickford-Fairbanks phenomenon to Beatlemania. This documentary itself has now become a cultural artifact of its own period.

I very highly recommend the Suds DVD for the academic value of its contents which will satisfy both the film enthusiasts and Film/Media Studies and Women’s Studies scholars.