A Film Canon

An incredible advance upon Stella Maris, Daddy-Long-Legs commences with the same rich girl-poor girl narrative, but only attaches Mary Pickford to the latter, relegating the former to the ugly, demonic periphery attributed to the working-class in the earlier film ("petted, pampered and spoiled"). Concomitantly, Neilan elaborates the plight of the impoverished orphan with a much grittier realism than occurs in Stella Maris, although this may be more due to the presence of novelist Mary Webster and screenwriter Agnes Christine Johnston, who also ensure that the intertitles, while wordy and frequent, are never intrusive, thanks to their wry, sharp, eloquence, as well as the humorous visual metaphors that they establish. However, most noticeable is Pickford's transformation from a series of  typecast gaits and tics to a full-blown slapstick figure, encapsulated in the sequence in which her character, Judy Abbott, accidentally becomes drunk and leads the entire orphanage on an anarchic spree - and, more specifically, her vertiginous navigation of a staircase whose lurching motion only she can apprehend. It's also worth noting the heightened elegance of the father-lover conflation, which, deflected into an anonymous patron - 'Daddy-Long-Legs' - who also happens to be one of the main characters, means that the two roles can approach each other to a much greater extent, their romance couched within those exquisite, pastoral, location sequences that are the flipside of the film's realist proclivities.