Fanchon, the Cricket (Famous Players -- later Paramount, 1915)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday night’s Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” was of a 1915 film that had long been thought totally lost: Fanchon, the Cricket, co-written (with Frances Marion) and directed by James Kirkwood, Sr. (whose son, James Kirkwood, Jr., co-wrote the script for A Chorus Line and I got a chance to interview him just four months before he died: I asked him if his dad had been up for Valentino’s role in The Sheik and he said he didn’t know, but he did tell me that his mom, actress Lila Lee, had played the “good girl” in Valentino’s Blood and Sand and, because he was fond of eating traditional Italian foods, heavily spiced with garlic, Lee asked that her love scenes with Valentino be filmed in the morning so she wouldn’t have to deal with his garlic breath after lunch) and starring Mary Pickford as Fanchon, a girl in the French countryside (I’m assuming it’s the south of France because some of the costumes look vaguely Spanish as much as French, and in the communities along the border region between France and Spain some of the cultural and sartorial customs overlap) who lives with her grandmother Fadette (Gertrude Norman) whom the townspeople think is a witch. Fanchon herself is the local troublemaker who runs around the woods and plays tricks on the people who venture near her, including splashing water on them from the local creek and,if that isn’t enough to infuriate them and keep them away, throwing rocks at them.

Fanchon, the Cricket is based on a novel by the 19th century French woman writer George Sand (true name: Aurore Dupin Dudevant), who’s come down in history more for her love life (she was Bisexual but her two most famous partners were male, novelist and poet Alfred de Musset and composer/pianist Frederic Chopin) and her role in the literary scene of the time than for anything she actually wrote. (In the 1970’s British TV did a miniseries about her but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a movie based on anything she wrote.) There’s not much of a plot to this one -- Fanchon spots the male lead, Landry Barbeau (Jack Standing, the sort of beefy schlub that frequently served as silent leading men before the advent of the athletic Douglas Fairbanks, later Pickford’s husband in real life, and the androgynous and still sexy Valentino) at his engagement party to Madelon (Lottie Pickford, Mary’s sister -- her brother Jack is also in this film, in an unspecified role, and Mary reportedly particularly cherished her experience working on this film because it’s the only time she and both her actor siblings got to be in the same movie). Naturally Fanchon instantly falls for Landry and determines to break up his engagement, but she laments that she doesn’t have any clothes nice enough to attend the town’s festivities.

Of course, this being a 1915 silent movie based on a 19th century romantic novel (one suspects if George Sand had lived 100 years later she would have published with Harlequn), Fanchon isn’t really the descendant of that woman who’s been raising her in a hut: “grandma” presents her with a batch of fine clothes and a letter revealing her true parentage. It seem that -- stop me if you’ve heard this before -- Fanchon was the daughter of a well-born woman (though we don’t learn exactly who she was) who for some reason left her in the care of this old hag just before her own death, and now that she’s grown (Mary Pickford is playing a teenager here -- she was 23 when the movie was made but in quite a few of her films she was literally playing a child; indeed a number of Pickford’s silent vehicles were remade with Shirley Temple) her foster-grandma has decided to let her know her true status and gives her a locket from her mom documenting it. Fanchon also turns out to be the one person in the area capable of nursing Landry to health after he’s become deathly ill (another cliche that’s launched a thousand movies since!). The ending is a bit on the ambiguous side -- we’re sure from decades of seeing these movie conventions recycled that Landry is going to abandon his fiancee and end up with Fanchon, but the last scene we see of her is her dancing in the wheat fields, alone.

Overall Fanchon, the Cricket is an enjoyable film that’s made special by the sheer subtle power of Pickford’s acting; she completely avoids the overwrought physical gestures most people associate with silent films (though most people who haven’t ever watched a silent film start to finish think these hammy gestures were more common than they were) and registers her emotions with an extraordinary series of subtle and often fleeting changes in facial expression. The rest of the film is nothing special; Jack Standing is a stolid leading man who’s too far removed from anything a modern audience would consider sexy; Lottie Pickford isn’t bad as the renounced fiancee but the part doesn’t give her much to work with (and director/writer Kirkwood avoids the clash between the two women -- “You can’t take my man away from me!” “Oh, yeah? He’s my man now!” -- we’ve been expecting all movie); and the grandmother is also pretty much a stick figure, made up to look like a prototype of the Wicked Witch of the West even though we learn she’s not a witch at all, thanks to one of Kirkwood’s best shots: we see a crucifix on the wall above her bed and that tells us she’s a good Christian instead of a member of a witch cult.

Fanchon, the Cricket was considered a lost film for decades -- Mary Pickford went to her own grave in 1979 thinking the movie no longer existed -- but in 2007 a print was discovered in the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. Later a partial print turned up in the British Film Archive (which had the advantage of having the intertitles in English instead of French) and the two archives and the Mary Pickford Foundation teamed up for a full-bore restoration. There’s also a persistent rumor that Fred Astaire and his sister Adele were in this movie; apparently they visited the set in New Jersey and watched some of the filming but there’s no evidence they actually appeared before the camera (though it’s faintly possible Kirkwood pressed them into service as two of the people dancing around the film’s maypole), and Milton Berle later claimed to have appeared in this movie as a child (he didn’t, just as he didn’t play the child in the film Tillie’s Punctured Romance in 1914 with Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin -- as the villain! -- even though for years he claimed he had). Fanchon, the Cricket is a pretty straightforwardly directed film; Kirkwood doesn’t use the moving camera shots or dramatic point-of-view editing D. W. Griffith was employing at the time (1915 was also the year of Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation, the first truly great film and an artistic triumph despite its horrible politics), but the film moves effectively and doesn’t seem static or boring the way a lot of pre-Griffith silents do. Though pretty conventional, Kirkwood’s direction and editing (no separate editor is credited, though that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one) at least keep the film moving fast and showcase Pickford’s marvelous performance. Alas, the restored print comes equipped with a modern soft-rock instrumental score that gets really distracting at times, and I wish the presenters had gone with either Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne or a score based on the original folk songs Canteloube adapted.