Little Annie Rooney (1925)

Director: William Beaudine
Writers: Hope Loring and Louis Lighton, based on a story by Catherine Hennessey
Star: Mary Pickford

Index: That's a Wrap!

Based on my rating alone, I clearly enjoyed Little Annie Rooney back in 2005, but that was a little before I started reviewing movies, so I’m unable to tap into my thoughts at the time. In 2025, I can’t ignore the obvious fact that Mary Pickford was far too old to play this role.

The thing is that she knew it too. She was a big star in the teens, very possibly the biggest, and she built her career on playing children, a natural gravitation for someone four foot ten who looked great in curls. That was believable in 1917 when she played The Poor Little Rich Girl and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm at twenty-five, but she’d become the most powerful woman in Hollywood, a co-founder of United Artists with complete control over her films. So she moved on to adult roles, as you might expect.

Unfortunately, the public didn’t follow her. They still wanted “the girl with the curls” and they told her so after she asked them during an interview for Photoplay. So she made this, a feature that opens with a protracted battle in the back streets of a bowery between Annie’s gang and the Kid Kellys. Every participant is a kid and looks it, except for Pickford. It seems anomalous to start with and gets progressively more awkward as she and fifteen year old Joe Butterworth start leaping onto each other.

The audience at the time loved it. This tied for ninth place at the box office in 1925, right behind The Lost World. Today, it looks like one of the two child gangs is led by an adult who’s pretending to be one of them and there simply aren’t any good reasons for that in our minds.

Otherwise, it looks good. These kids are old school rough and tumble kids, happy to throw bricks at each other and back it up with fists. Of course, like The A-Team, nobody’s ever hurt, beyond the odd scratch and torn shirt. I loved that Annie starts out in a great hiding place, a chimney on top of a dilapidated building. It’s a lot less great when she’s used all its bricks to hurl at the Kid Kellys. Everything was shot on a Pickford-Fairbanks studio set but the design and cinematography are excellent.

While it initially feels like this battle will be the entire film, there’s a deeper story behind it, one that Pickford wrote herself, albeit using her grandma’s name, Catherine Hennessey, an appropriate nod given that she was Irish and this neighbourhood is seriously multi-cultural. The Rooneys and the Kellys are Irish, down to Pa Rooney being the local policeman, but their gangs are a hodgepodge of ethnicities: Jewish, Chinese, African American, you name it, to the Our Gang formula. However, this is darker and there’s even a key plot progression reliant on a kid being able to understand Greek.

You see, while the Kid Kellys gang is all kids, there’s a Big Kellys gang too for adults and it’s led by Joe Kelly, Mickey’s elder brother. Once again, hindsight doesn’t help, because William Haines actually does a pretty solid job as Joe. However, he was still new and hadn’t built his screen image yet. I remember him from a few years later when he was incredibly popular for being impeccably annoying. In 1925, this was a good role for him that helped to establish his career. With hindsight, his future image works against us believing it.

Of course, you’ve read between the lines at this point to see that Little Annie has a huge crush on Joe Kelly, who hangs around because her elder brother Tim Rooney is one of the Big Kellys gang, as much as that drives Officer Tim nuts. He wants Tim Jr. to go onto the force too but he’s heading in the opposite direction.

This crush doesn’t seem weird to us because Haines was gay, as he (and a decent chunk of Hollywood) played straight on screen in film after film. It’s weird because we’re supposed to buy into Annie being something like fifteen. While the film does keep this crush as just that until the very end, the final scene relies on her suddenly growing up into a lovely young lady while everybody else in the picture remains as old or as young as they were all along. That’s a heck of a cheat to pull on us.

There’s not a lot more to the story than that until late on when we follow the adults to the Pansy Social Club Dance at Sullivans Hall and yet again hindsight causes problems, not least with the most openly gay actor in Hollywood leading the way. However, it wasn’t until 1929 that the slur gained gay connotations. In prior centuries, “pansy” was still a slur but one that tied to class, used by working men against less muscular academics, taken from “pensée”, the French for “to think”.

We’re told in one of many clever intertitles that anything can happen at these dances and probably will and, sure enough, this one has a murder. With such a skimpy framework for a script, I can’t tell you who’s involved and why without spoiling the film, but, if you pay a tiny bit of attention as it builds, you’ll ably predict whodunit and why, who pressured him into it, who he was aiming at and who he kills instead. This isn’t rocket science, maybe appropriately so given the lack of education shown by these characters when we reach a blood transfusion.

For me, this worked best in the little details.

The kids in the opening battle are obviously thoroughly different, to the degree that Abie Levy isn’t allowed to fight because it’s a Jewish holiday, but, after it’s over, they’re all dragged in to see Officer Kelly by one parent in exactly the same way. Nobody gets special treatment.

Spider, overtly the oldest of the Big Kellys, a man introduced as someone recently released from jail again, doesn’t want to pay to get into the dance. He has to rely on his girl slipping cash from her stockings into his hand so he can pretend to have found it in his pocket.

Annie’s knitted a tie for her dad’s birthday but realises that one of the gifts from ladies on his beat is a better one. It’s easy for her to just swap them so she does, but then swaps them back again. She’ll lie but she won’t cross her heart on one. She’s a good girl underneath.

There’s a lot of fun to be found here if we’re able to pretend that it’s still 1925 and there’s a decent amount left even if we can’t.

Pickford didn’t remotely look fifteen, even if she used every trick the movies had to vainly try to persuade us. It couldn’t last and it really shouldn’t have lasted this long, but once again she’s the cute endearing ragamuffin that her fans wanted to see.

Fortunately, she was a master of silent film acting, overplaying enough to boost story and character but not so much as to spoil them, even in slapstick scenes, and she’s also able to tweak our heartstrings by the end.