There's Something About Mary

If you were reading the September blogs from the Toronto Film Festival you may recall a report on the screening of the Mary Pickford silent classic Sparrows (1926). Well, the GFT is now providing you with a chance to see why Pickford was one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the 20th century. This Wednesday ( November 18th) there is a special screening of My Best Girl with piano accompaniment from Jane Gardner.

If Sparrows is a grim Victorian melodrama then My Best Girl is a sunny Cinderella story showcasing the star's comic timing and slapstick prowess. Pickford plays Maggie, a hardworking stockroom girl in a five-and-dime store who takes a fancy to a new worker who seems to be the most clumsy, inept employee the store has ever known. Charles ' Buddy' Rogers is not quite what he seems and you can probably guess the rest. In real life he would become Pickford's third and final husband in a forty year marriage that lasted through her reclusive final years until her death in 1979.

Made in 1927 at a cost of almost $500,000, My Best Girl was Pickford's final silent film and perhaps the last truly great success of her career. American filmmaking was reaching an artistic peak in the late silent period embodied in films like Sunrise (1927), The Crowd (1928) and The Wind (1928). My Best Girl was dismissed as a piece of fluff and it is light and frothy; a final throwback to a more innocent era when love conquered all and the world was enraptured by the golden curls and impish charms of Mary Pickford. That is part of its appeal today along with the sense of yearning for homely American values in an era already careering towards the nightmare of the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression. An added bonus is the elegant cinematography of Charles Rosher who captures all the bustle of big city life in the Roaring Twenties. The film earned in excess of $1 million at the box-office. If you have never seen a silent film then My Best Girl would be a good place to start.

Blogger: GFF Co-director Allan Hunter

Remembering Eustache

Reputation is a funny thing. There are film directors, like Alfred Hitchcock or Orson Welles, who never seem to go out of fashion and whose names are better known than many a star. The re-issue of Welles' Citizen Kane has just finished at the GFT and the wonderfully entertaining Me And Orson Welles arrives in early December with a performance from Christian McKay that is less impersonation than uncanny resurrection.

Then there is a director like Jean Eustache who if he is known at all in Britain is known for The Mother And The Whore (La Maman Et La Putain) (1973) (pictured above), a three and a half hour epic most of which is taken up with people taking about sex. It is widely regarded as Eustache's masterpiece and the one film that truly captures the extraordinary self-absorption and disillusionment of the French intelligentsia in the afterglow of May 1968. The presence of Jean-Pierre Leaud as the philandering, narcissistic Alexandre seems to underline its status as a withering critique of the attitudes and iconoclasm of the nouvelle vague.

There was more to Eustache than The Mother And The Whore and this month's French Film Festival shines a focus on a man frequently cited as one of France's most important filmmakers. Eustache was born in Pessac in the south-west of France in 1938 and worked as a railwayman before moving to Paris. His wife was the secretary for Cahiers du Cinema. Eustache began his filmmaking career with the prize-winning shorts Bad Company (Les Mauvaises frequentations) (1963) and Le Pere Noel a les yeux bleus (Santa Claus Has Blue Eyes) (1965) in which Jean-Pierre Leaud earns the money for a duffle-coat by working with a street photographer who needs him to play Father Christmas. The disguise gives him an unexpected confidence and audacity with women.

Often compared with Eric Rohmer, Maurice Pialat and John Cassavetes, Eustache made films that muddied the line between fiction and reality. His documentaries like The Pig (Le Cochon) (1970) captured aspects of French rural life on the brink of disappearing. His features were frequently autobiographical in tone , intense and unrelenting in their pursuit of emotional truth. Numero Zero (1971) features a lengthy interview with his elderly grandmother Odette who talks about a life that has encompassed personal heartache and the tragedy of a nation dragged through wars and seismic social change. My Little Loves (Mes petites amoureuses) (1975) , photographed by the legenday Nestor Almendros, revisits aspects of Eustache's own adolescence to capture a beautiful rites of passage story in which a boy is uprooted from his familiar country life to live with his mother and her lover in the big city. His discovery of an adult world culminates in a first kiss while watching Pandora And The Flying Dutchman-no wonder cinema cast such a spell over his life.

The commercial failure of My Little Loves had a significant impact on Eustache's aspirations and ambitions. His subsequent films saw him return to low-budget documentaries, personal reflections on art and the most obvious example of his blurring of fact and fiction in A Dirty Story (Une Sale histoire) (1977) in which a friend of Eustache tells of an obsession with a peep hole into a ladies room in a cafe. The same story is also fictionalised using actors challenging all kinds of notions about voyeurism and humiliation.

Eustache took his own life in 1981. He once observed: " I see suffering all over. I've always seen it. I hope people don't suffer in vain." The rich and challenging legacy of his films answers that question and makes these rare screenings a top viewing priority this month.

Jean Eustache films screening at the GFT as part of the French Film Festival UK are The Mother And The Whore (November 23rd), Numero Zero (November 24) and My Little Loves (November 25).

Blogger: GFF Co-director Allan Hunter