Year: 1916
Director: John Emerson
Country: US
Language: N/A
Mary Pickford was the queen of the movies, a talented and popular performer whose brand was built on quality productions. Throughout the silent era, she had been fighting for better scripts and more creative control at Famous Players-Lask. Having the sheer iron will of a business-woman, Pickford knew that her career was limited and could slip away at any moment. Unfortunately Less Than Dust was a bad career move at the time as it did not see successful box office returns at the time.
In this film a little English girl, abandoned in India and raised by an Indian swordmaker, learns of her true origin and returns to England to seek out her birthright.
Around this specific time, Pickford had a phase of trying to play every ethnicity that would come to mind. She had played an Inuit (Little Pal), a Japanese woman (Madame Butterfly) and the dutch (Hulda from Holland). It seems strange that such a white woman would desire to play someone from India. The heroine of this picture is rather strange, as she shoplifts and incites religious violence when the owner confronts her about it. Am I supposed to feel empathy for this character?
The twist isn't something you can see coming, but that's because it's completely out of the blue (in a negative sense). When she travels to England the film's plot takes a nose-dive as it's now somehow a fish out of water comedy complete with...crying about roast beef? and finding out her skin color is actually just dirt she forgot to wash off? Holy shit that's racist. Even for 1916!
Less Than Dust clearly deserved the indifferent attitude it recieved from the American public when it was first released. Even if this film hadn’t been racist, it's just a dull picture that becomes incessantly annoying the further we trek through its run-time. Pickford was a great actor, but even she can't shed any light on this catastrophe.
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