
Little Sara Crewe is placed in a boarding school by her father when he goes off to war, but he does not understand that the headmistress is a cruel, spiteful woman who makes life miserable for Sara..

Frances Marion, Frances Hodgson Burnett
United States

Gilded captivity never looked so ravishingly cruel. The 1917 adaptation of Burnett’s novella arrives like a hand-tinted postcard that has been wept upon, its amber blues and rose pinks flickering in a stroboscopic waltz. Mary Pickford, twenty-four yet uncannily childlike, incarnates Sara with an ethereality that feels...

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Comparing the cinematic DNA and archive impact of two defining moments in cult history.

Marshall Neilan

Marshall Neilan
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" Gilded captivity never looked so ravishingly cruel. The 1917 adaptation of Burnett’s novella arrives like a hand-tinted postcard that has been wept upon, its amber blues and rose pinks flickering in a stroboscopic waltz. Mary Pickford, twenty-four yet uncannily childlike, incarnates Sara with an ethereality that feels scraped from moonlit alabaster. She shifts from miniature maharani to soot-smeared drudge without ever shedding an inner corona of sovereignty, a trick accomplished less through p..."


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