Kiki

A total delight! This famous flop for Mary Pickford is VERY funny and totally fun.

Pickford plays a French chorus girl in New York trying to make good and survive. Pickford's French accent may not be as good as Marion Davies' in "Marianne" but she's wonderfully funny in this role. It's a talkie extension of all the great comic parts she played in silent films.

Pickford was a great comic and proves she had what it takes to make it in talkies. KIKI is a terrific comedy and she's better in this than in her other three talkies. KIKI was based on the Norma Talmadge silent film which was based on the Broadway play. Oddly I just read in the Valentino biography that he had seen Lenore Ulric in New York and then Gladys Cooper in London in the stage versions.

The film opens with a LONG panning shot of backstage doings all in time to the song the chorus girls are stomping away to. Pickford gets fired but insinuates her way back into the chorus via the producer (Reginald Denny). On opening night she makes a shambles of the big number starring Margaret Livingston as the vain star. Pickford is hysterically funny.

Not realistic at all but great fun. Co-stars include Joseph Cawthorn, Phil Tead (funny as the butler), Edwin Maxwell, and Fred Walton.

The sets for the apartment are atrociously ugly. Not to be believed! An explosion of Victoriana and Art Deco.

Mary Pickford was definitely one of the greats!

Mary Pickford had made 240 films before the advent of sound movies. She was the darling of filmdom until then. But from 1929 to 1933 she made just six films. Although she won the second Oscar as leading actress for "Coquette" in 1929, her last films bombed. "Kiki" is one of those. The plot isn't very good, and Pickford 's role was probably the worst possible thing she could have had. She had a squeaky voice, and in this film she has a French accent and talks, whines, talks, whines, and talks. She quickly becomes tedious and agitating.

Pickford is the classic example - and perhaps the most prominent, of the big name stars of Hollywood whose careers soon ended with talking pictures - mostly due to the sound of their voices. Audiences of her day must certainly have reacted the same way to "Kiki" as most would in modern times. The image of the darling and coquettish actress certainly changed with sound.

Pickford supposedly downplayed the prospect of movies adding sound. It's not hard to imagine that someone with such a squeaky voice could realize that it would soon end her acting career. But, while sound was her undoing in front of the camera, Pickford stayed in Hollywood producing films for another 16 years before calling it quits at age 57.

Reginald Denny is the male lead here. He too had a long run in silent films since 1915, but he was able to transition well with his voice in sound films and he made movies into the mid-1960s. Denny had some lead roles, but most were in a variety of supporting roles.

The production and technical qualities of this United Artists film still show some of the raw techniques of silent films. Pickford was a 1919 co-founder of United Artists, along with Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, and Douglas Fairbanks who was soon to become her husband.

Except for curiosity of movie buffs who might like to see Pickford in a sound film, this one isn't worth the time.

In a woefully inept performance almost completely absent of charm and nuance Mary Pickford embarrasses herself in her second to last feature. Utterly miscast as a Parisian floozy she does everything but stand on her head to try and make us believe the unbelievable. She has one cute dance/clown number although even there she relies on googly eyed exaggeration to get the point across that the audience is to find her adorable. In this instance she isn't.

For a goodly portion of the movie she wears a stupid hat with a feather that seems to form a question mark, she should have looked in a mirror used that as a cue and asked herself why she'd agreed to disgrace herself in this dog of a film. Stay away!

The dance scene is what most people take away from this movie and that certainly was a 10 out of 10 moment. I have watched it many times and it is up on Youtube.

The rest of the movie suffers from direction and script and the need to make Mary over act to fit the part. This was a stage play not really suitable for film without a change. The stage productions earlier success was grounded on deliberate stage over acting. So it is not surprising it didn't suit film that well. The film without Pickford would have been irritating, it is Pickford that saves it and makes it watchable.

But we should also remember that at this time studios were still struggling with Sound and this made direction and acting quite difficult.

Mary could have easily taken this onto the stage and had a big hit with it, she was a veteran stage actor.

If anything this movies shows Pickford to be versatile and willing to step out of the box.

Having been aware of Mary Pickford only by reputation up to this point, it is kind of a shame that I chose this to be the first film of hers I watched. But to be fair, I didn't watch it for her. Busby Berkeley choreographed a number early on, and that madcap farce ended up being the best thing about this. As for Pickford, let's just say she, along with practically the rest of the film, is a hot mess. Everything about her performance, from the exaggerated gestures to the atrocious French accent, screams trainwreck. As the quote I chose headline with might indicate, the best parts of this, few as they are, happen when she isn't talking. Beyond that, the source quality on YouTube was barely watchable. I don't see myself sitting through this again, but it was fun enough this once.