Film of the dayWednesday 28 October

The Extra Girl

F. Richard Jones, Mack Sennett Productions, 1923. Sue Graham wins a Hollywood contest with the wrong photograph and is put in wardrobe. She mistakes a lion for the studio dog in a costume and walks him through the lot. The lion was Numa; Picture Play (1927) quoted trainer Charles Gay on her taking the rope without asking if it was safe. Sennett appears in the screen-test scene. It was her last feature with him.

Spotlight: Mabel Normand

Mickey

Mabel Normand's 1918 feature, produced by Mabel Normand Feature Film Company for Goldwyn: an orphan raised in a California mining camp is sent east to an aunt who does not want her. F. Richard Jones directed. Normand, already the most important woman in Keystone comedy, here plays a whole picture: tomboy, debutante, the girl who can ride and the girl who can cry. It was a hit. The later scandal swallowed the career. Mickey is the film that shows what was lost.

French Avant-Garde

The Italian Straw Hat

Un chapeau de paille d'Italie

René Clair, Albatros, 1928, from the Labiche farce. On his wedding day Fadinard's horse eats a married woman's Italian straw hat in the Bois; her lover will not let her go home without a match; the wedding party sits downstairs while he hunts a copy. Albert Préjean is the groom. Clair times doors and hats the way he timed the frozen city. Cinémathèque restorations are the usual show print. A one-gag play, directed as if the furniture were in on it.

Early Hitchcock

The Farmer's Wife

Hitchcock, BIP, 1928, from Eden Phillpotts's stage hit. Samuel Sweetland (Jameson Thomas) is a widower who makes a list of eligible women and is refused by each of them. Lilian Hall-Davis is Minta, the housekeeper who helps him write the list. Gordon Harker does the handyman. Eliot Stannard adapted it. The comedy is rural and a little cruel. He looks everywhere except the room he already lives in.

Spotlight: Mary Pickford

The Love Light

Frances Marion directed, Mary Pickford produced, United Artists, 1921. She is an Italian village girl who keeps a light for a lover lost at sea and then takes in a man who is not who he says. Marion was already among the highest-paid screenwriters in the business; this is one of the few features she signed as director. The tone is darker than the sweetheart pictures. It did not become a cycle.