Stella Maris (Mary Pickford Company, Artcraft, 1918)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Bachelor Mother on Saturday, July 26 Turner Classic Movies showed a film that was a genuine masterpiece: Stella Maris, made in 1918 by director Marshall A. “Mickey” Neilan for Mary Pickford’s production company and released through Artcraft Pictures, Paramount’s higher-end label. It was based on a 1913 novel by British writer William John Locke and was scripted by Pickford’s favorite writer and close friend, Frances Marion. It cast Mary Pickford in a dual role: as Stella Maris, a well-to-do girl disabled from birth, unable to walk and permanently bedridden; and Unity Blake, a scapegrace orphan in London with a penchant for getting into trouble. Stella’s family, her aunt Eleanor Blount (Ida Waterman) and uncle Sir Oliver Blount (Herbert Standing), have decided deliberately to keep her isolated from the rest of the world and its troubles and make sure everything in her environment is sweetness and light. Her and Unity’s plot lines intersect when one of Stella’s friends, journalist John Risca (sometimes spelled “Riska” – the intertitles are inconsistent), is married to a scapegrace woman named Louisa (Marcia Manon), who adopts Unity with the intent to turn her into a Cinderella-style household drudge. We immediately know Louisa is a “bad girl” when we see her smoking – in 1918 it was still considered shocking to see a woman smoke a cigarette. She’s also an alcoholic, and much later in the film we see her with a hypodermic needle and other drug paraphernalia on her bedside table: a clear depiction of addiction in this genuinely “pre-Code” era. Louisa sends Unity out with a shopping basket and some money to buy groceries, but Unity is attacked by a street gang and her purchases stolen. This angers Louisa so much she literally beats Unity within an inch of her life, and the domestic violence call is answered by the same police officer who earlier had refused to help Unity because there was nothing he could do for her. The upshot is that Louisa is arrested and sentenced to three years for assault, while Unity is returned to the orphanage. Meanwhile, a super-surgeon (Gustav von Seyffertitz) tells the Blounts that he can perform an operation on Stella that will enable her to walk for the first time in her life. The Blounts agree to authorize the operation even though it means that Stella’s blessed isolation from the evils of the world will end and she’ll be confronted with all the uglinesses of human nature, including World War I, which was still going on when this film was made. Three years pass, during which Stella’s recuperation is complete, she and John Risca realize they are in love with each other, but when Stella is confronted by Louisa Risca and she tells her that she and John are married, Stella’s already stretched faith in human nature is snapped completely and she decides John is just another of the liars who have deceived her all her life.

Stella Maris explores surprisingly dark territory for a film of its vintage, and while its plot is too sentimental to qualify as proto-noir, director Neilan and cinematographer Walter Stradling (uncle of ace cinematographer Harry Stradling), whose promising career was cut short when he suddenly died of pneumonia on July 4, 1918 just after he shot this film, shoot much of it, particularly in the darker second half of the story, in full-out noir style, with the characters’ faces in half-shadow and an overall chiaroscuro look unusual in a 1918 film, especially one made before The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the other German Expressionist classics that pioneered the “look” of film noir. Neilan and Stradling also worked out some surprisingly convincing double-exposure shots to show the two Mary Pickford characters in the same frame, at a time when special effects were so primitive the only way to show the same person onscreen twice was to mask off half the film, shoot one character, rewind the film in the camera, change the mask to the other side, and shoot the scene with the other. Stella Maris’s plot plays so far against the clichés of the time it’s not always clear how this film could end, but ultimately [spoiler alert!] Unity, in unrequited love with John Risca herself and incensed when Louisa declares her intent to make both his and Stella’s lives miserable forever, shoots her and then herself, thereby freeing John and Stella to get married. The 1918 Stella Maris is a quite remarkable film, proof that Mickey Neilan was as great a director as Gloria Swanson and others who worked with him said he was (though given Louisa Risca’s plot line in the film it’s almost unbearably ironic that Neilan was himself an alcoholic who drank himself out of a major career). It was remade, again as a silent, by Universal in 1925 with Mary Philbin (ingénue lead in the original 1925 The Phantom of the Opera), as Stella and Unity and Elliot Dexter as John Risca, but so far no one has taken it on since: a pity because the story, as far-fetched as it is, is also deeply moving and well worth telling. The whole plot device of Stella being carefully protected by her guardians from the world and all its ugliness reminded Charles of the origin story of Buddha – a prince who was carefully shielded from the outside world and the depradations of humanity until one day he escaped – while it reminded me of Tchaikovsky’s one-act opera Iolanta, in which the family of a girl blind from birth keep her carefully isolated so she won’t know that sight exists at all and therefore will remain in blissful ignorance of what she’s missing. Stella Maris is an extraordinary film, and should be required viewing for anyone who still believes that silent movies were a swamp of overacting. Mary Pickford’s performances as both Stella and Unity are models of understatement, and aside from Conway Tearle, who’s easy enough on the eyes but (like a lot of other silent-era leading men) a bit too phlegmatic and reserved to deliver the character’s charisma, the other actors (particularly Marcia Manon as the villainess of the piece) are likewise excellent. The 1918 Stella Maris, pieced together by the Mary Pickford Foundation and the archivists of Paramount and the Library of Congress from a full print of the original negative and a partial print with color tinting and toning, is a real gem of a film and I’m glad I finally caught up with it!