My best girl [NTSC]

Displaying a fine talent for comedy in “My best girl”, Mary Pickford plays Maggie Johnson, a clerk at a dime store who struggles to reconcile her devotion to her family with her personal desires. Along with her postman father and eccentric mother, Maggie lives with Liz, her selfish and wanton sister. Liz provides Pickford’s character with a moral contrast, as Maggie nearly sacrifices all to keep her family intact. Charles “Buddy” Rogers (Pickford’s future husband) plays Joe Grant, son of the dime store owner where Maggie works, posing as a humble clerk in order to prove his stoicism to his father. At times the film overflows with romantic melodrama and sentimentality, but it also contains some classic silent film sequences and makes numerous salient dramatic points about the class-consciousness of American society. The film also serves as a deft indicator of the conflicts rife within American society in the 1920’s Depression, depicting the elite as oblivious to the daily struggles of the impoverished working class. Cast also includes Sunshine Hart, Lucien Littlefield, Hobart Bosworth and Carmelita Geraghty as Liz. Silent film with musical soundtrack written by David Michael Frank.