Rosita

Pickford is impressive as the poor peasant entertainer with whom the King becomes ridiculously obsessed. Having seen some of Pickford's earlier 'little girl', romanticism movies this was a refreshing change and demonstrates how she was able to extend her range given the opportunity, utterly convincing as she is playing the fiesty young rebel as a woman with attitude. She reminded me of our contempory performers such as Madonna. Always amusing and beautifully composed by Lubitsch, whilst not a classic a highly enjoyable film.

I'm sorry, but the audience who rejected this movie in 1923 were right: Mary Pickford just can't play it sexy. Neither is she convincing as a fiery ridiculer of authority. Her usual childlike impishness is sorely out of place here; when the king lusts after her, you have to suspect him of child molesting tendencies. However, the movie does have its funny moments, in a very Lubitsch way; the amusing efforts of the king to avoid the monogamous-minded queen make up for some deficiencies.

The King of Spain (Holbrook Blinn) visits the carnival in Seville where he listens incognito to Rosita (Mary Pickford) singing a cheeky song that criticises his rule. Rosita is arrested, though Don Diego (George Walsh) intervenes while she is being dragged off to jail, only to be jailed himself. Of course the lecherous king has become interested in the pretty street singer - but so has Don Diego, who is now being sentenced to death because he killed the officer who had arrested Rosita... and so on. What follows is a quite convoluted affair, and that is one of my points of criticism. The whole setup is so complicated that there would have been material enough for a couple of films. As it is the whole thing feels rushed, despite the one hour forty minutes it takes. A consequence of this is that the characters remain pretty one-dimensional (this is my second point of criticism). The king cannot control his sex drive, Don Diego is noble, Rosita not above accepting favours but nevertheless sweet, pretty and lovable. At the end of all this the queen appears more or less like a deus ex machina to resolve the complications. The settings of the film are sumptuous, as are the costumes that place the story roughly in the Napoleonic era (when Spain had other problems than the king's libido). In sum: Fundamentally this is a watchable picture, but there are a number of weaknesses that make it more difficult to enjoy than many other silent films.

"Rosita" (1923) stars Mary Pickford and is directed by Ernst Lubitsch; so...it should be a dynamite piece of film viewing. It's certainly not bad, but it's no masterpiece. Mary is a street singer during what appears to be some century in Seville hundreds of years ago. She is a sort-of François Villon poet/singer who chooses to snipe at the reigning king and his government and the taxes imposed which siphon the wherewithal out of the peasant class. By the upper classes Mary is constantly monikered 'harlot'. She is eventually dragged away by nasty government agent during Carnival festival, but a noble steps up, one who is recently returned from serving military service, and he stops the agent; then gets into a sword duel with him; kills him; then is put into prison where in the morning he will be hanged. Mary is put into the same prison. I'll let it hang there so you can find the film and watch to see what occurs!

Begins slowly. The story is a good one. What happens, though, is that this should have been a good drama. Even a few Pickford light moments would have worked to make this work if it had remained a good drama. Instead...it turns into a second rate meller/romance. Mary doesn't seem happy during this film. Something must have been up. We know historically that is true.

Well worth the watch. But this one does NOT have the Lubitsch touch. Instead, this one's 99 minutes is simply too long. I enjoyed the ending, but I knew it would happen the way it did. Probably would have been better with the Hitchcock touch; or simply letting Mary do her own version. This is on the new Blu-Ray release from Grapevine Video, a Kickstarter project with work done by Jack Hardy and a piano musical score by David Drazin. Score is good, though the Carnival scene music is a tad overwrought.

Also appearing with Pickford are Holbrook Blinn as the king; Irene Rich as his wife, the queen (and who is the person I think did the best job of characterization, and was a pleasure for the little time she appears); George Walsh as Don Diego, Mary's love interest; Mathilde Comont as Mary's mother; George Periolat as Mary's father; and many, many others. Supposedly Charles Farrell and Marion Nixon are here somewhere.

Mary Pickford was a stickler for preserving a large body of her films. She prized almost every movie she was in, and, unusual for an actress, she collected scores of prints of her work. One notable exception was September 1923's "Rosita." She demanded and was handed over almost every existing print distributed a few months after the movie was released. With the exception of one: a print 90 minutes long was found in 1960 in the Soviet Union, and given to New York's Museum of Modern Art, much to the consternation of an aging Pickford.

No explanation for Pickford's obsession in destroying the film was given. It wasn't because of any negative reviews. In fact, it was just the opposite. "Nothing more delightfully charming than Mary Pickford's new picture Rosita has been seen on the screen for some time," wrote the film critic for the New York Times.

"Rosita" was certainly a landmark motion picture, mainly because it was German director Ernst Lubitsch's first United States film after directing scores of German movies for nearly ten years. Pickford, just turning 30, had yearned to escape her popular child roles (played as an adult) and witnessed Lubitsch's sophistication on the screen as the panacea to that change. She contracted him to come to America and apply his craft with her as a lead. Once on shore, Lubitsch learned the actress wanted to make a film on the then popular genre of an elaborate costume drama. The director shot down one Pickford suggestion, while his desire to direct a version based on Faust was nixed by Pickford's mother because of a baby-killing scene. They settled on a 1872 opera about a libertine Spanish king who falls for Rosita (Pickford), a poor but very popular singer in Seville, Spain.

Pickford gave no reason for her unusual confiscation of "Rosita." One theory is she realized after seeing the finished print that she wasn't the heroine of the story; the Spanish queen is. Another is she wanted to forget what she later claimed was Lubitsch total authoritarian behavior. "I detested that picture," said the elderly actress years later to biographer Kevin Brownlow. "I disliked the director as much as he disliked me." But contemporary sources at the time of "Rosita's" production claim, beside a language barrier between the actress and the director, the two got along charmingly on the set. She wrote after the completion of "Rosita" that Lubitsch was " the best director in the world." They had planned to make more films together, but tight funds at Pickford's United Artists precluded such a working relationship.

"Rosita" turned out to be a tremendous hit, gaining the number six best box office position of 1923, and established Lubitsch's America's credentials. Warner Brothers signed him to a three-year, six picture lucrative deal, with total freedom to select his actors, crew and most importantly, final say in the finished product.

Pickford did, however, preserve one reel of "Rosita," a sequence that has gone down in classic film lore where she uses a fruit bowl as a prop to ward off the aggressive king as he tries to seduce her in his suite.