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.
