Rosita (Mary Pickford Company, United Artists, 1923)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. I watched Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” featuring a quite interesting if rather flawed movie called Rosita, made in 1923. It was produced by its star, Mary Pickford, who at the time was one of the founders of United Artists and had complete control over her own career – though she was still stuck by her fans into playing children even though she had just turned 30 and wanted to establish herself as a wider-ranging actress who could play adult characters and depict adult emotions. Rosita began as a play by Philippe Dumanoir and Adolphe d’Ennery that got adapted into a script by Norbert Falk, Edward Knoblock and Hans Kräly, and to direct it Pickford brought Ernst Lubitsch over from Germany. This was a time when Lubitsch was known primarily for elaborate costume melodramas featuring the proverbial casts of thousands and often dramatizing the great sexual scandals of history. When he made Rosita Lubitsch was coming off the international success of his version of Madame Du Barry, starring Pola Negri and released in the U.S. as Passion, and obviously Pickford was hoping for something similar from him to break her “America’s Sweetheart” image.

The story deals with Rosita, a poor street singer in Seville, Spain, whose entire family – her mother (Mathilde Comont), father (Georges Periolet), two brothers (Philippe de Lacey and Donald McAlpin) and a sister (Doreen Turner) – depend for their survival on what she can make as a busker. In an era in which it was common for playwrights to build up anticipation of the star’s appearance by keeping their character off stage (or off screen) for the first 20 minutes or so, we first get glimpses of the Spanish royal court in Madrid, where the king (Holbrook Blinn) is a Don Juan type, far more interested in affairs of the heart (or at least the bedroom) than affairs of state. He’s shown playing patty-cake across a card table with three of his anonymous paramours while his prime minister (Charles Belcher) futilely tries to interrupt him to get him to sign some death warrants. The King hears that a carnival is going on in Seville and it features all sorts of licentious goings-on which his queen (Irene Rich) tells him he has a moral duty to stop. Instead he high-tails it to Seville to partake of the forbidden delights himself, and naturally when he sees Rosita perform he’s immediately smitten and will do just about anything to deflower her. It’s true she’s already got a boyfriend – Don Diego del Alcalá (George Walsh, who was the original choice for the lead in the silent Ben-Hur until Ramon Novarro replaced him), described in the titles as “a penniless nobleman,” but the king doesn’t think that’ll be a problem.

When the king attempts a sexual assault on Rosita and Don Diego draws his sword to protect her, the king has both of them arrested and sentences Don Diego to death (that’s one death warrant he is willing to sign!). He’s willing to let Rosita out on condition that she visit him in his royal digs – and once that happens Rosita shifts gears and changes from the big, bloated period drama that had made Lubitsch’s German reputation to the sort of delightful envelope-pushing romantic comedy that would make him famous in the United States. The king lavishes fancy presents on Rosita and invites her to his villa – and she insists on bringing her whole family, including their dog (there’s a delightful scene of them attempting to squeeze all her relatives, along with the dog, into the royal carriage that was sent for her and her alone), to the villa. She dutifully and virtuously refuses all the fancy proffered gifts – and her relatives, especially her mom, think she’s nuts and keep them anyway. She also pours almost half a bottle of perfume onto a handkerchief and then passes it around to her relatives (I was expecting a sneezing gag here but the writers and Lubitsch blessedly spared us). When the servants act snooty towards her she demands that the king make her a countess – and initially he begs off but then hits on a stratagem: he’ll have her marry Don Diego, but with her veiled and him masked so neither of them will know who the other is, and then he’ll be executed and she’ll inherit his title. Only during the wedding ceremony they lift their face coverings and peek, and once Rosita realizes that she’s just married the man she actually loves, she demands that the king repeal his death sentence. He agrees but explains that for the sake of judicial protocol he can’t just set Don Diego free. Instead he will have to stage a fake execution with blank-loaded guns (the execution is supposed to be by firing squad because, as a member of the hereditary nobility, Don Diego has the right to be shot instead of hanged like a commoner) and Don Diego will have to make it look like he’s really dead.

Well, anyone who’s seen Puccini’s opera Tosca immediately knows where this is going: as soon as Rosita is out of earshot the king countermands his initial order and insists that Don Diego be executed for real. There’s a shot of Rosita lurking in the corridor as the king is giving this order, but it’s not clear whether she understands it or not. In any case, Rosita witnesses from her window as Don Diego is shot by the firing squad and falls dead. She claims the body as his widow and invites the king over for dinner, telling her servants to set the table for three – the third one being death. Pickford’s acting, which has heretofore been serviceable but a little too coy (an occupational hazard for silent-movie heroines), suddenly turns deadly serious as she gives the king some if-looks-could-kill expressions while they’re both drinking wine. From the glumness of Pickford’s countenance I was expecting that she had slipped poison into the wine and therefore she would kill the king and herself in a murder-suicide – and the scene is so starkly acted and shot I suspect that might have been the originally planned ending. But just as Rosita is about to deliver the coup de grâce and stab the king just as he’s about to have sex with her, the “dead” body of Don Diego comes back to life. It seems the queen heard what was going on and decided to intervene, countermanding the countermand and ordering that Don Diego’s execution be faked after all, and in the final scene Rosita and Don Diego are standing on the balcony of the villa the king had given her and waving goodbye to the royal carriage, inside of which the queen is lecturing the king about following the straight and narrow and avoiding extra-relational amours from then on.

Rosita is an intriguing film but also a flawed one, suffering from a lack of character consistency and some neck-snapping reversals, especially in the final reels. It was also a film Pickford herself turned against in later years; it was one of the few Pickford films of which she didn’t retain a copy (though she kept the fourth reel until she donated it to the New York Museum of Modern Art, whose pioneering movie curator in the 1930’s, Iris Barry, first established the idea that motion pictures were a true art form, worthy of preservation: another heroine of American culture you’ve probably never heard of!), and it was thought lost until a print finally turned up in Russia in the 1970’s. There followed a lot of laborious work cleaning up the image quality and also restoring the original titles, since the extant print (except for the fourth reel) carried only Russian-language titles and the English ones had to be reconstructed from whatever records existed (cutting continuities, censorship reports and even contemporary reviews that quoted the “dialogue”). Rosita is a pivotal film in Lubitsch’s career even though it shows him as not an especially innovative director technically – he was still shooting pretty straightforwardly from stationary cameras and using realistic sets while fellow German directors like Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang, F. W. Murnau and Paul Leni were exploring elaborate camera movements and frankly unrealistic sets.

Where the film scores is in the romantic and sexual intrigues in and around the king’s court; Erich von Stroheim once compared himself to Lubitsch by saying, “Lubitsch first shows you the king on the throne, then the king in his bedroom. I first show you the king in his bedroom so you will know exactly what he is like when then you see him on the throne.” In Rosita Lubitsch comes closer to Stroheim here, first showing the king in his amorous intrigues – like the king in Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’Amuse (“The King Amuses Himself”) and the Duke of Mantua in Verdi’s Rigoletto, his adaptation of Hugo’s play, the king here is a fornicating bastard willing to fuck anything as long as it’s human, female and will (or can be ordered to) hold still for him. The scenes in which the king tries to force himself on Rosita and she innocently pushes him away – it’s kept ambiguous whether she’s that naïve or she really knows what he’s after and is just feigning innocence – are the best shots in the movie, more interesting than either the spectacle at the beginning or the melodrama at the end. TCM host Jacqueline Stewart said Rosita was a major hit on its initial release (which is not what I’ve read in other sources; I’ve read it was a flop and nearly sank Lubitsch’s U.S. career before it even started; he saved himself by signing with Warner Bros. when it was still a minor studio and working out the high romantic style he’d become known for in films like Forbidden Paradise and The Marriage Circle), and it holds up today as a good but flawed movie.

It’s positive that Mary Pickford was willing to experiment with her image and make a movie so far off the beaten path, but I’m not sure how well the experiment came off and there are scenes of Pickford trying to be “bad” – or at least pose as “bad” – that Gloria Swanson or Greta Garbo could have brought off easily but Pickford struggles to make believable. At least the Museum of Modern Art, which supervised the restoration of Rosita, used a musical accompaniment based on the original score by Louis F. Gottschalk (not to be confused with the 19th century African-American composer Louis M. Gottschalk), including a surprising bit of Bizet’s opera Carmen (also about the sexual shenanigans of a lower-class girl in Seville!), though not one of the Big Tunes you’d expect to hear. Instead Gottschalk appropriated the Flower Song in Act II, which in Bizet’s original is sung by the tenor who complains that he got himself arrested for Carmen’s sake and now she won’t give him a tumble. In Rosita it’s used as a Leitmotif for the love between Rosita and Don Diego.