Kiki

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!

This is so like Mary Pickford.

Even in one her apparently not so good movies she deposits a number of special moments and some in this movie are totally enjoyable.

The long dance scene is wonderfully choreographed and hilarious, I had to keep watching it over and over.

People often forget that in the earliest talkies actors were hamstrung by the positioning and quality of microphones. It took them a while to work it out and for actors to work out how to free themselves up again.

This is by no means a bad movie. An enjoyable movie with some special moments and also great to see a different Pickford.

Pickford only made one more movie, mostly because external events and pressures were over taking her life. If only Fairbanks could have stayed true to Mary - we may have got a whole bunch of Mary Pickford movies and in a new genre.

The transition from silent to talkies was a killer for most silent screen actors and actresses. The more they talked, the more audiences realized their acting abilities were pretty dramatically shallow. Some who had survived learned to say less and display more of a physicality between them and their co-stars.

It's a lesson Mary Pickford should have learned. Right out of the gate, 'America's Sweetheart' became enamored with dialogue. Her first talkie, 1929's "Coquette," taken from a 1927 Broadway play, features her adopting a southern accent. The film is filled with dialogue. But she was awarded an Academy Award Best Actress, where she lobbied the organization's judges for the win. Her next talkie was 1929's "Taming of the Shrew," co-starring her husband, Douglas Fairbanks. Another failure. Next came March 1931 "Kiki," yet another Pickford stage adaptation, this one from an Andre Picard 1918 play. In it, the actress adopts a French accent while the feature film is equally filled with lots of talking.

Pickford plays a chorus girl who has trouble learning her steps. She falls in love with producer Victor Randall (Reginald Denny), who still is in touch with his ex-wife. "Kiki" failed miserably in the theaters, partly because Pickford's loyal fans weren't used to her playing a brash, provocative showgirl who constantly wears tight shorts, who takes off her bra underneath her blouse while standing in front of Victor, and who sits in front of a male theater assistant in only her underwear slowly pulling up long nylon stockings one leg at a time. Her new on-screen persona failed to deliver box-office magic, creating a loss for United Artist studio she and her partners owned.

Today's viewers cite one particular scene where Pickford shines. Early in "Kiki" she gets a chance to display her comical dancing talents. The musical number, choreographed by Busby Berkeley following his Hollywood debut in 1930's "Whoopee!" consists of the 'Goldwyn Girls' and Pickford. The actress' physicality is a pure delight to see, especially her athleticism at the age of 39. She performs several pratfalls and stunts, amusing the on-screen theater audience, but causing much angst to the show's managers and the band's drummer. The 10-minute sketch, which is likened to a Lucy Ball skit, serves as a reminder why Pickford's silent screen movies were so popular. But once the number concludes, she descends back into a dialogue-filled yapper.

"Kiki" was Pickford's second-to-last film. An era was quickly closing in on one of early Hollywood's most influential actresses. For one brief sequence, "Kiki" viewers in 1931 were able to capture the enormous talents of Pickford, a trademark that earned her the nickname "America's Sweetheart."

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.

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.