Sally of the Sawdust (1925)

Director: D. W. Griffith
Writer: Forrest Halsey, from the play Poppy by Dorothy Donnelly
Stars: Carol Dempster and W. C. Fields

Index: That's a Wrap!

While the star of Sally of the Sawdust is Carol Dempster, playing, well, Sally of the Sawdust, the key name here is her co-star, W. C. Fields, because this is a pivotal film in his career for a variety of reasons.

For one, he plays a versatile show man, Prof. Eustace McGargle. His first and, for my money, most impressive routine is comedic juggling, a routine that’s perfect except when he doesn’t want it to be, at which point he loses balls but uses a quick foot movement to regain them as if nothing untoward had happened. It should not surprise that this was Fields’s specialty as a vaudeville performer.

For two, it’s based on a stage play from 1923 called Poppy. That wasn’t his first experience on Broadway, as he’d debuted in 1905 and was a regular in Ziegfeld Follies revues, but it was a lead role, with Madge Kennedy, that made his name as an actor. He was the only actor to go from play to film and he shot a sound remake, Poppy, in 1936, with Rochelle Hudson.

For three, the routine that gets McGargle in trouble is the shell game, though he insists it’s not gambling at all but a game of skill. “It’s the old army game”, he claims. This film and That Royle Girl after it landed him a contract with Paramount and his first film for them was It’s the Old Army Game.

I’ve seen a lot of W. C. Fields movies, but all of them were sound films until now (I followed this up with the 1915 short Pool Sharks). That’s partly due to half of his twelve silent pictures being lost and partly due to his heyday being a lot later than this. However, other than being uncharacteristically thin and sporting a stick-on moustache, it’s not hard to see how he got there from here.

We start and end in Connecticut, in Green Meadow, but the end is happier than the start. Judge Foster and his wife are “rich in acres but poor in cash”, but that doesn’t stop him being traditional enough to kick his daughter out of the house when she marries a circus man. Five years later, in the far west, that man has died but before she follows suit, she tells her friend, Prof. Eustace McGargle, about her family, and leaves her own daughter, Sally, in his custody.

Crucially, McGargle writes to the Fosters to let them know their daughter has died but he doesn’t tell them about Sally. He merely brings her up himself within the world of the circus, so she becomes “a strange whimsical creature, part tomboy, part woman”.

Carol Dempster nails that description rather well, because Sally’s completely at home with elephants, trapezes and comedic juggling but hasn’t figured out that she could be desirable, reminding instead of Jack Lemmon in drag in Some Like It Hot. She’s who she is, without any filters, and that’s refreshing to see. To her, life in the circus is an absolute joy.

However, McGargle suddenly realises that a lot of time has passed and she’s growing up. A carny trying to force his attentions on her and a mass brawl—“Hey, rube!”—after he fleeces a bunch of suckers with the shell game has him wondering if he’s done all he can and now he’d be best taking her to her family so they could take over. They hop a train to Green Meadow to take work at its annual carnival, so he can see if they’re “the right sort”.

If you hadn’t already figured out everything after about five minutes, then you’ve figured it out by this point and we’re still only twenty minutes into an almost two hour movie. This is astoundingly predictable, the only details to still learn being names.

For instance, the rich boy who falls in love with Sally at first sight, not caring that she’s a mere show girl instead of say, granddaughter to Judge Foster, his neighbour and close family friend, is Peyton Lennox. You’d guessed every other detail, I’m sure, just not that particular name. You’d also guessed that Judge Foster is happy to do everything he can legally to keep his friend Lennox’s son from making a fool of himself with this nothing of a carnival girl. It’s all predictable, not short on irony.

And, of course, it provides some characters with plenty of opportunity and others none at all. Erville Alderson is good as Judge Foster but it’s a one note character until the final scenes. Alfred Lunt is a complete nonentity as Peyton Lennox but then what else could he be? Only Effie Shannon as Mrs. Foster manages to find a way to go deeper than the one note she has to play with. Her scenes with Sally before either knows the truth are endearingly emotional.

Mostly, it’s down to Dempster and Fields as the leads and both are excellent.

Carol Dempster is top billed not only due to playing the title character but because she was a regular in D. W. Griffith’s entourage and she was established, actually closing in on the end of her screen career at twenty-three. She had made sixteen films since an uncredited role in Intolerance in 1916, almost all of them for D. W. Griffith, but she only had two to go before she retired to marry a banker in 1926. She’s great here because she doesn’t do what the majority of actresses would have done in her shoes. She feels honestly quirky and free-spirited.

She has the most opportunity to run loose but Fields has the most grounding. McGargle is the only character in the film who knows who Sally is and, for various reasons, he keeps that knowledge to himself until the most dramatic and most crucial moment in the movie. Which moment he’ll choose to reveal it is the one and only detail to keep us on the hook, though it’s gradually forced onto him by complications in the later stages and the arc his character was always feted to follow.

Bottom line, though, I liked Sally here and I liked McGargle. They both deserved more out of the scenes at the circus and carnival, which are populated by regular people, even if they do special things. Nobody feels real the way a Tod Browning film would make them feel. And there are surprisingly few show scenes too, as we get back to Green Meadow quicker than we might expect and even shift some of the show out of the carnival and into the Fosters’ home for a grand ball.

Of course, I shouldn’t complain about there being too much melodrama in a melodrama. It does what it does and it gets to where it needs to get to, even if it takes its sweet time to do so and feels like a longer movie than it actually is as a result. In turn and in context with the rest of the year’s film output, it also feels older and more traditional, which isn’t a positive.

Anyway, so which shell is the ball under?