Suds

Amanda Afflick (Mary Pickford) is a laundry worker in London early in the 20th century. She is small and weak and the other girls at the laundry pick on her, but she has one consolation: she adores a male customer who left his shirt eight months ago. In front of her colleagues she pretends he is her lover and she is the disowned daughter of an 'arch-dook'. A sub-plot tells how she saves the ancient horse that pulls the laundry cart from being sent off to the knacker's yard. If there is any single film that demonstrates what a great actress Pickford was it is not one of the pictures where she plays a little girl; it is this one. Without any camera tricks and with minimal makeup she manages to appear as an entirely different person - small, wizened, with hunched shoulders and pinched face, whose underlying beauty becomes apparent only at second sight. 'Suds' tells a story that is not particularly happy but it is still full of humour and even of slapstick-like fun (the film exists with several endings, I saw the version where Amanda and her true admirer are reunited with the horse in the countryside). In the course of her career, Pickford would make more sophisticated pictures, for my taste reaching her high point in 1927 with 'My Best Girl'. However, 'Suds' is incomparably better than the earlier efforts of her that I have watched and it showcases her talents perfectly. Highly recommended!

A Mary Pickford vehicle. I've seen a small handful of her films, and this is probably my favorite of them so far. It's no great work of art, but it's a cute little comedy and Pickford's performance is quite funny. Here she plays a Cockney laundry girl. She dreams of being wooed by a nobleman, and has even told stories to her teasing co-workers about her dream man being real. A subplot about a horse Pickford saves from the glue factory leads her to find true romance. While that description sounds more like typical silent melodrama, it's really lightly handled and goofy, with a lot of slapstick. It never reaches the kind of brilliant humor of the great silent clowns, but it's quite enjoyable.

Okay, so I've checking message boards and after seeing pretty much all of the Mary Pickford films one can get on video-which is just a small percentage-I have to say Suds is one of my favorites. It's really goofy, and yeah, a little uneven, but in a way that's it's charm. It has some real goofy charm, I like that Pickford plays a total screw-up. Most of her intentions are good, but she's also a liar, she's a very dynamic person. Often I get bored of Mary Pickford films because she would get stuck playing one-note characters. Amanda is an interesting character because she's such a dork. It's a little sad because seeing odd but charming choices she makes as Amanda, such as the scene where she can't stop scratching the itch on her arm, or the scene where she stitches a portrait of guy she likes into his own shirt show that while she got more opportunities than most women of her time if things had been different she may have been female Charline and not a footnote in cinema history-a title she doesn't deserve anyway. it's a good film.

SUDS is one of Mary Pickford's finest hours, a multi-faceted comedy-drama that runs the gamut from slapstick to heart-touching poignancy. Set in 1800s London, Mary stars as Amanda, a homely little laundress in a dump of laundry. Her only friends are the boy and an old, half-dead horse that deliver the cleaned clothes. Amanda gets through her grim existence nursing a crush on a well-dressed if smug customer, her only link to a better world, who eight months earlier dropped off a shirt to clean which he's never returned to pick up. Twice weeks she washes the shirt in hopes of his eventual return. The other women laugh at her delusions as she claims he's her boyfriend and they are both from the upper classes, her father having kicked her out for their romance to see if anyone will love her for herself and not her inheritance. It's all baloney, of course, but it seems Amanda half believes it herself. There's an enchanting segment where Amanda tells her coworkers her story that allows Mary to be beautiful and glamorous (her faux boyfriend's looks and clothes also having improved from reality) as she is shown in her castle of her home, with Amanda, the beau, and her father all speaking via screen titles in the broken Cockney English of Amanda and her earthy associates. Misfortune continues to plague Amanda and when she least expects it, the phantom "boyfriend" returns for his shirt at long last (or rather, comes in with another shirt to clean).

Mary is wonderful in this charming movie often compared to a Chaplin vehicle but perhaps more of a realistic fairytale with touches of D. W. Griffith and Mack Sennett, often wearing a tight grin that suggests a poor girl hiding bad teeth and also force optimism. The supporting cast has only small parts but then Mary never did really need any help to make a movie an extraordinary experience.

A not-entirely-successful, offbeat, change-of-pace for America's alleged Sweetheart, Mary Pickford. Playing a Cockney laundress in an excellently re-created London, she is at her best with the comedy: falling in and out of laundry bins, hiding under baskets, keeping a horse in her apartment, etc. As for the pathos, our heroine is less sympathetic here than usual, mainly because most of the character's problems are brought on by herself and her own unhealthy fantasy life (some of which is depicted in a lengthy, but wonderfully loopy, imaginary flashback). There is no real villain to overcome but herself -- and she fails to manage a victory. The ending (or endings -- three different final scenes were filmed) is abrupt and not terribly convincing. The supporting cast, though competent, is unmemorable -- except, perhaps, for Lavender, the horse, who gets a couple of good bits, including a final sight gag in one of the endings: pulling a chair, and the movie, out from under poor Mary.