A Film Canon

This bourgeois fantasy turns on the encounter between Unity Blake, a poor orphan, and Stella Maris, an aristocratic cripple, both played by Mary Pickford, and culminating with Unity's astonishing suppression of both herself and the demonic commoner who forms the common denominator between her and Stella's world, relegating the working-class to a noble invisibility, rather than a social reality; or, alternatively, enivsaging the product of class struggle as the moment at which the working-class spontaneously destroys itself in an act of shameful self-recognition. In keeping with this inability to conceive of society dialectically, romance is entirely subsumed into a father-daughter and, more generally, genealogical register, encapsulated in Unity and Stella's relationship to John Risca, their uncle and adopted father respectively, while the issue of childbirth is deflected into the kitsch subplot that develops around Stella's pets, but, admittedly, doesn't completely extend to Pickford's performance which, at least in terms of Stella, is relatively naturalistic.