The Poor Little Rich Girl

Gwen is the only child of a wealthy family, and nobody at home pays her any attention. Her father thinks only about making money and her mother only about her social position; the servants treat the girl as a burden. Gwen's only companion is her imagination. One day, through the carelessness of one of the servants, she is given an overdose of medicine and falls into a long sleep between life and death. The world she sees in that sleep makes up the second half of the film. The dream section contains some of the most ambitious fantasy in silent cinema; figures of speech are turned into images and death appears as a character. Maurice Tourneur's direction uses stage sets and lighting directly in those passages. Mary Pickford was twenty-four when she made it and played a child of eleven; the part established the mould that would define her whole career. By the usual account the studio at first thought the child-comedy scenes went too far, and the reaction of audiences showed otherwise.