Fanchon, the Cricket (Famous Players [later Paramount],1915)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Unfortunately the “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature shown after Deliverance was a pretty sorry piece of work. It was called Fanchon, the Cricket and was made in 1915, directed by James Kirkwood for Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players company (later to become part of Paramount) and starring Mary Pickford as the titular Fanchon (called “Fadette” in the 1840 novel by George Sand on which the film was based – and the idea of Mary Pickford starring in a story by George Sand made me think this was going to be a much better movie than it was). At the time Pickford died in 1979 this film was presumed lost – much to Pickford’s disappointment because not only had she worked her ass off to make sure all of her films (or at least the ones she had control over) were preserved, it’s the one time she appeared with both her siblings, sister Lottie and brother Jack. Ultimately a duplicate negative was found at the Cinemathéque Française in 2007, then an incomplete print was discovered at the British Film Museum, and a restoration company in Italy brought the two surviving prints together to assemble a composite of the complete film, which was then digitally reprocessed to create the version TCM showed last night. It turned out to be a pretty dreary film, set in a small farming village in central France where dancing seems to be the principal amusement. The only hints we get that farming is going on is a scene towards the middle in which Mary Pickford as Fanchon is strolling through a corn field whose stalks are taller than she is, and a scene towards the end in which Fanchon’s boyfriend Landry (Jack Standing, one of those strong, reliable, solid and rather stolid leading men who abounded in the silent era, at least until Rudolph Valentino became popular in the early 1920’s) walks through an equally imposing wheat field.

Other than that, the movie is an endless series of big community dances, mostly around a May pole, Fanchon lives with her grandmother – or at least the woman who’s raised her and told her she’s her grandmother – who’s suspected by the locals of being a witch and having taught Fanchon “the craft,” but precious little is made of that. She manages to get Landry away from his previous girlfriend, Madelon (Lottie Pickford), but aside from that virtually nothing happens. Matters weren’t helped by the terribly doleful musical score added to the film by two modern-day composers, whose work was praised by “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart as “folk-rock” but no doubt made it harder for both my husband Charles and I to stay awake during the film: Charles called it “Windham Hill noodling” and said he wished the Mary Pickford Foundation could have commissioned modern-day rock artists to contribute songs the way Giorgio Moroder did for an early-1980’s reissue of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. (I’ve never actually seen the Moroder version of Metropolis, but Charles has and believes it was his first encounter with Lang’s science-fiction masterpiece.) My own wish for a score for Fanchon, the Cricket would have been an instrumental version of Joseph Canteloube’s Songs from the Auvergne, a set of folk-song adaptations which would at least have been authentically “French” and appropriate for the setting. Fanchon, the Cricket was a disappointment all the way round (up to and including the preposterously ugly font selected for the intertitles, which had to be back-translated into English from the French ones in the Cinemathéque Française print – and a lot of those translations “in the day” were themselves pretty preposterous; the 1914 Pearl White serial The Perils of Pauline only survived in a French print and some of the titles literally make no sense) and hardly the film I was expecting and hoping for from the combination of Mary Pickford and a George Sand story!