Johanna Enlists (Mary Pickford Productions, Artcraft, 1918)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 23) Turner Classic Movies offered as their “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature a 1918 film called Johanna Enlists, directed by William Desmond Taylor (whose still-mysterious death in 1922 – he was shot but it’s never been definitively determined by whom or why – is about the only thing anybody remembers about him) and produced by its star, Mary Pickford. Johanna Enlists began life as a short story by Rupert Hughes, Howard Hughes’s uncle, called “The Mobilizing of Johanna.” From the title I was expecting a story in which Johanna Ransaller (Mary Pickford) was so excited by the patriotic fervor surrounding America’s entry into World War I that she donned male drag and literally enlisted. (There are a number of recorded instances of this happening during the American Revolution and the Civil War, but by 1917 it was standard practice to give enlistees physical examinations that would have “outed” any drag kings who tried to get in.) Instead it’s a rural comedy set on a farm in which Johanna is forced to work relentlessly and regularly beaten by her mother (Anne Schaefer) whenever she tries to slack out of line. At one point Johanna offers a prayer to God to send her a “beau” to liberate her from her drab farm existence. Instead God, Rupert Hughes, or Frances Marion (Pickford’s long-time writer, who did the screenplay) send her a whole regiment of them, courtesy of the U.S. Army, which is preparing to deploy them in France. When the site where they were supposed to camp falls through for some reason Hughes or Marion don’t make clear, they approach Ma Ransaller and her husband (Fred Huntley) for permission to rent their farm for the next few weeks. Naturally, Johanna is overjoyed at the presence of so many men in her life, and while the officer in charge of the outfit, Col. Roberts, is played by an instantly recognizable Wallace Beery, some of the men under his command are genuinely attractive. Among them are Lieutenant Frank LeRoy (Emory Johnson) and Private Vibbard (Monte Blue, the only cast member besides Pickford and Beery we’ve seen in anything else), though the one Johanna is most attracted to is Captain Archie van Rensselaer (Douglas MacLean) because he arrives at the Ransaller farm already ill and Johanna has to nurse him back to health.

Johanna is also in search of glamour, which she reads about in magazines, including one that recommends milk baths as the way to have great skin. So she makes herself a milk bath, laboriously pouring bucket after bucket of milk (presumably fresh, since they are on a farm after all!) into her tub and lowering herself into it in a surprisingly graphic sequence even for this genuinely “pre-Code” era. (There’s also a scene in which Johanna is shown bathing her younger twin sisters, played by June and Jean Prentis. At first I saw their names in the cast list and thought that even in 1918 the filmmakers were pulling the trick of casting twins as a baby character to avoid violating California’s laws on how many hours a day kids can work, but no-o-o-o-o: the actors were really playing twins.) Alas, Johanna’s milk bath is rudely interrupted by LeRoy and Vibbard, who walk into the room where she’s taking it and have a fight in which the tub is knocked over and all the milk spills out over the floor. Johanna has an innovative way of cleaning it up; she lets loose a pride of puppies on the floor and they eagerly lap up the milk. But the incident results in LeRoy preferring charges against Vibbard and putting him on trial in a court-martial in which Johanna becomes the star witness. Ultimately she’s able to persuade LeRoy to drop the charges against Vibbard, who’s acquitted (we’re not quite sure of what), and both men are free even though the one Johanna ends up with is Lt. Rensselaer, because the similarity in their tongue-twisting last names indicate that they’re both descendants of the Old Dutch nobility who colonized New York (or “New Amsterdam,” as they called it) in the first place. (I still remember the marvelous scene in the 1970’s TV-movie Eleanor and Franklin in which Franklin Roosevelt laconically proposes to Eleanor by saying, “Mr. Roosevelt would like to know if Miss Roosevelt will consent to becoming Mrs. Roosevelt.”) At the end there’s a breast-beating patriotic climax in which Pickford, as an honorary colonel in the U.S. military, poses next to Ralph Faneuf, the real colonel who commanded the real-life regiment seen in the film.

Johanna Enlists was preserved in an unusual way: the only surviving print was found in 1956 in the archives of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (an odd place indeed to be involved in film preservation, though maybe the Agriculture Department was involved because the film takes place on a farm) and printed down to 16 mm. Unfortunately, the sole print was missing the first half of the third reel, which was reconstructed here via production stills and intertitles either copied from the cutting continuity (a record of a completed film after it’s edited, as compared with the shooting script which was frequently revised on the spot during production) or newly written. (The newly written titles were indicated by an icon of a typewriter in the lower right-hand corner.) This is something of a surprise because Mary Pickford was usually meticulous about preserving copies of all her movies (though at one point late in her life she briefly considered destroying them all; luckily, she didn’t). Another film she let slip through the cracks was Rosita, made in 1923 and the first American credit for director Ernst Lubitsch (I’ve published a commentary on it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/01/rosita-mary-pickford-company-united.html), a quite good Carmen-esque melodrama set in historic Spain. I’m not sure what I think of Johanna Enlists as a whole; it’s obviously a well-made movie (director Taylor wasn’t exactly a major innovator on the order of Griffith, De Mille, or Stroheim, but he certainly knew his way around a set and had a basic command of the grammar of film as it existed c. 1918) with flashes of brilliance. But it’s also a flawed film in many respects, including the flibbertigibbet nature of much of Pickford’s performance (like coyness and simpering, an occupational hazard for silent-film heroines) and the forced “rustic” writing of the intertitles to denote the characters’ rural accents, and frankly I think I’d have liked it better if Johanna really had enlisted. The production credit to “Artcraft” was a prestige label invented by Pickford’s usual home studio, Paramount, until First National lured her away later in 1918 and she ended up as one of the co-founders of United Artists – and according to another co-founder, Charlie Chaplin, Pickford knew more about the articles of incorporation and other legal documents than any of the other partners or their attorneys: she was that good as a businesswoman.