Best Films - 1914
by Andre Soares
Tess of the Storm Country, directed by Edwin S. Porter (of The Great Train Robbery fame) is technically primitive and thematically saccharine, but it boasts a solid comic performance by Mary Pickford, at the time probably the most popular film performer in the world. As a result of the film industry’s rapid technological progress, Pickford remade the story a mere eight years later, with herself playing once again the bratty waif who saves her father from prison and marries a rich, good-looking guy. Ironically, the smoother 1922 Tess is considerably duller than the 1914 version, partly because of its very technical proficiency (the creakiness of the earlier vehicle perfectly matches the story’s quaintness), and partly because Pickford’s gamine playing had by then become a tad too mechanical.
Janet Gaynor starred in an unwatchable Fox remake in 1932, and Diane Baker played Tess in a little-seen 1960 film. Harold Lockwood (pictured above), a popular star of the 1910s who succumbed to the Spanish influenza epidemic in 1918, played the love interest in the 1914 version.
DIRECTOR
Reginald Barker (The Wrath of the Gods)
Giovanni Pastrone (Cabiria)
ACTRESS
Mary Pickford (Tess of the Storm Country)
SHORT FILM
The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (d: D.W. Griffith)
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