First Major Archival Series Includes Virtually All the Surviving Feature Films
Blanche Sweet Starred In, Including Works by D. W. Griffith and Cecil B.
DeMille
June 7–22, 1996<
To celebrate the centenary of a charming and highly original actress whose
professional stage and film career spanned six decades, the Department of Film
and Video of The Museum of Modern Art presents Blanche Sweet: A Centennial Retrospective,
comprising twelve feature films and twenty-two short works.
The series, which runs from June 7 to 22, presents virtually all the surviving
feature films in which Blanche Sweet starred, including Cecil B. DeMille's
The Warrens of Virginia (1915), Frank Reicher's The Case of Becky
(1915), John Griffith Wray's Anna Christie (1923), and Marshall
Neilan's The Sporting Venus (1925). Also presented are two of Sweet's
sound films, Mervyn LeRoy's Show Girl in Hollywood (1930) and Robert
Ober and Albert Kelley's The Woman Racket (1930), as well as a
significant sampling of her Biograph work for D. W. Griffith and his
assistants. Among these is Griffith's Judith of Bethulia (1913), which
is accompanied by rare outtakes of Sweet rehearsing on the set.
Blanche Sweet was born in Chicago on June 18, 1896. By the time she appeared
in her first film at age thirteen, she had already been on the stage for nearly
eleven years. Her first role came when she was eighteen months old, in a
popular melodrama called Blue Jeans, in which she was carried on to the
stage so that one of the actors could kiss her foot. Sweet's celebrity status
was assured in her late teens when, in roles that demanded preternatural
maturity for a young woman, she starred in several films by Griffith, including
The Lonedale Operator (1911), The Painted Lady (1912), and,
notably, the biblical drama Judith of Bethulia. In 1914 Sweet left
Griffith for Cecil B. DeMille, who cast her in The Warrens of Virginia
and The Captive (1915). It was the first time that DeMille, then a
young director, was able to cast a bona fide movie star in one of his films.
Blanche Sweet's independent spirit, as well as her deep commitment to film
projects that she personally sought out and developed, made her a valued star
in the 1920s. During this period, she insisted on and enjoyed unusual freedom
as a freelance performer at a variety of studios—Ince, Pathé, Goldwyn,
and Metro—collaborating with sympathetic directors such as Clarence Badger,
Marshall Neilan (to whom she was married from 1922 to 1929), and John Griffith
Wray. Her stirring performance in Wray's film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's
Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Anna Christie greatly inspired Greta Garbo,
who filmed the story in 1930 for her first talking picture.
Sweet herself made three feature-length talkies, in two of which she also
sang: Show Girl in Hollywood, in which she stole the film away from its
young lead, Alice White, playing a silent film actress making an awkward
transition to sound; and The Woman Racket. She then returned to
the stage, playing on Broadway and in several touring shows.
Of her storied film career, which flourished in the two decades in which film
itself came of age, Sweet later said, "The pictures we made then had more
entertainment value than pictures do now. And we were idolized."
Blanche Sweet died in 1986.
Blanche Sweet: A Centennial Retrospective was organized by Steven Higgins,
Film Collections Manager, Department of Film and Video, and J. B. Kaufman, film
historian and coauthor with Russell Merritt of Walt in Wonderland: The
Silent Films of Walt Disney (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). The
Department of Film and Video is grateful to The Library of Congress, George
Eastman House, and the Turner Entertainment Co. for the loan of prints in this
series.
