Suds (Silent) (DVD)

Mary Pickford plays Amanda Afflick, a downtrodden laundress wrapped up in dreams of romance. She tells her co-workers that any day now, her wealthy fiance Sir Horace will arrive to rescue her from a life of drudgery. In reality, Horace is simply a man who dropped off a shirt eight months ago and never picked it up. Amanda is so caught up in this fantasy that she is oblivious to coachman Ben Pillsbury's romantic feelings for her. When Horace unexpectedly walks in looking for his shirt, Amanda begs him to pretend to be her fiance to spare her the humiliation. It's at that moment that Ben decides to finally make his feelings for Amanda known. All of a sudden, the homely girl has two suitors to choose from...

Encouraged by the success of Stella Maris (1918), in which she'd spent half the film playing an unglamorous girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Mary Pickford was determined to move even farther away from her "America's Sweetheart" image with Suds. Except for a brief fantasy sequence, Mary never appears as the pigtailed, childlike waif that moviegoers had grown accustomed to. Instead she plays a hardened woman ensconced in a life of drudgery, her only relief escaping into a world of fantasy. It's ironic then that this was the film Mary was making when she married the "King of Hollywood", Douglas Fairbanks. Suds is adapted from an English stage play called 'Op o' Me Thumb written by Richard Bryce and Frederick Fenn. Harold Goodwin, who plays Ben Pillsbury, later portrayed the tragic soldier Detering in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

• silent