Rosita, chanteuse des rues

"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.

Legends abound concerning the contentious on-set relationship between superstar Mary Pickford and director Ernst Lubitsch during the filming of Rosita. Despite Pickford's later efforts to keep the film out of circulation, screenings of the picture revealed a delightful surprise: the great German filmmaker had provided Pickford with her wish -- the showcase for a juicy role miles away from her "little girl with the curls" persona. Only the tiniest indications of what would later evolve into the "Lubitsch touch" exist in the tale of a street singer who rises to prominence in the court of a philandering king (skillfully portrayed by Holbrook Blinn), but Rosita is a handsomely mounted production with charm, wit, and plenty of romance to spare.

The restoration is a thing of beauty, with sharp images, good tints, a Handschlegel sequence that is charming, beautiful set design, and photography by Miss Pickford's regular cameraman in this period, the great Charles Rosher. Ernst Lubitsch, in his first American film, directs to show off everything, offers a few grace notes, and has turned out an overlong movie.

I admire Lubitsch's comedies endlessly, but I am not so fond of his historical epics. I understand their popularity at the time. With Europe in the last days of the Great War, and a couple of years coming out of it, looking at luxury on screen was all the escape audiences could get from a devastated continent. Yet showing that luxury takes up screen time, and Lubitsch seemed to feel no need to fill it up for those of us who exhausted that pleasure quickly. As a result of this, while the opening sequences of Carnival, waiting for Miss Pickford to appear amidst the innumerable extras, is exciting and fun and even a bit suspenseful, the constant barrage of magnificent clothes and high glass shots while Miss Pickford shows she is a great actress palled on me. She had already shown her range in an assortment of roles eight years earlier, when she played Indian girls, Scottish lasses and Madame Butterfly. In those movies, she had shown her range by offering her audiences drama and comedy. In this movie, it's Mathilde Comont and George who get the giggles, while Miss Pickford gets to do an 18th Century Suffering In Mink role in slow motion. Her features had been an hour in length. This one stretches to 100 minutes.

One of the reasons that Miss Pickford wanted to make this movie is she was tired of the popular movies she had made over the last few years, in which she played children or adolescents. "That little girl killed me" she later said. Did she understand the irony? An actor performs many roles, but when people go to see a star, they have expectations about what they'll be seeing. Miss Pickford was not going to play Lady MacBeth, even though she was undoubtedly capable of giving a bang-up performance. She stretched here to please the critics, and her fans accepted it and even enjoyed it, because it showed she was as good as they thought she was. Yet if it's that little girl killed her, it's equally true she made Miss Pickford one of the half dozen biggest stars in the history of cinema.

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.