Hulda from Holland (1916) User Reviews

Woodenshoe lover? Eye-dew!

[F Gwynplaine MacIntyre · 6/10 · 13 April 2010]

Another "lost" film found! 'Hulda from Holland' surfaced in Czechoslovakia's National Film Archive, in Prague, in 2001. The original credits and intertitles are missing, as are several insert shots of handwritten letters and a telegram, all replaced with Czech text. Under the guidance of Hugh Munro Neely, the Mary Pickford Institute have supplied new English translations of the Czech titles; sadly, these read like translations from Czech, and are surely very different from the original Famous Players intertitles. Many individual frames are deteriorated. The actual 'meet cute' moment — when John Bowers finds Pickford in his rooms — has survived in this print, but the sequence that sets this up, bringing Pickford into Bowers's rooms, is indeed lost. I wish that this print had lost a disgusting and unneeded sequence in which the youngest Dutch boy wallows in jam.

SPOILERS THROUGHOUT. Mary Pickford, got up here in a woodenshoe Katrinka costume like the Old Dutch Cleanser logo, is a Netherlands orphan raising her three younger brothers, who look like the Dutch Boy Paints logo. All four have blatant patches on their cozzies so we'll know they're paupers. The boys have no distinct personalities, and the youngest is disgustingly twee ... or just disgusting, full stop. (This story would have worked better with only two younger brothers, or even one.) All four travel to New York City, where she meets Bowers and they fall in love.

The plot suffers from two separate coincidences, both of them jumbo deluxe. Bowers gives a good performance, but his character is that annoying cliché: the scion of a wealthy family who is offered a solid position in the family firm yet prefers to starve as a sensitive bohemian ... in this case, drawing pictures of kittens. I've encountered this trope in dozens of stories and scripts, yet I've never accepted it as real. Can't this guy seek the muse at weekends while earning a good living the rest of the week? This time round, for once, the artist eventually decides to work for his wealthy father after all.

Mary Pickford, playing here a more mature version of her 'Little Mary' character, gives a much better performance than this script deserves. She has several excellent pantomime set-pieces, and performs them with subtlety and grace.

The film benefits from some excellent New York City location shots (including one of Pickford's stand-in encountering the Statue of Liberty) and some good period details. A shop advertises prime rib for 12 cents a pound. When a street accident occurs, the policeman must summon aid by going into a nearby drugstore to make a phone call.

The early scenes set in Holland feature stereotypical costumes, with a windmill that I could have sworn was fake. (I've now been told by Hugh Neely that this is an authentic windmill near Bridgehampton, NY.) There's no particular reason why the heroine had to be from Holland, nor even an immigrant. This being a silent movie, the issue of Dutch girl Hulda's ability to communicate with New Yorkers is never raised.

There's an unpleasant and unnecessary scene featuring an unsupervised goat that dies from poisoning. (The poor kid had no nanny.)

This is one of those movies in which the railway tycoons urgently covet some poor farmer's land. For once, this plot gimmick is resolved intelligently. Apparently in this case there's no law of eminent domain to force the sale. There's some originality in 'Hulda from Holland' but also two very long coincidences, some clichés, and that disgusting little boy. Mary Pickford's excellent performance, well-supported by John Bowers, raises this movie to 6 out of 10.

It's Ninety Per Cent You Get a Great Script and Ten Per Cent Actors

[boblipton · 3/10 · 13 April 2010]

That's what William Wyler said about making good pictures, and according to him nothing else mattered. And here we have great actors but with a lousy script.

First, let me note the historical issues that might have caused me to dislike this film: it was missing for about eighty years, then turned up in the Czech Film Archives about 2000. A video copy was made, but it runs at 56 minutes, with several cuts that indicate the film broke -- I guess Czechoslovakia was the end of the circuit ninety years ago -- and the big 'Meet Cute' between Mary Pickford and John Bowers is substantially missing. In addition, the original titles are gone, with the current English titles being translations from the Czech.

Even bearing this in mind, this picture is a stinker of a programmer, with only a few minutes of Mary's clowning in the middle to relieve the foolishness. Most of this can be blamed on poor writing.

For example, Mary and her brothers have just landed on the dock at New York, where uncle meets them, says "I'll be right back" and is promptly run over by a truck. He's in the hospital for a month. They're succored by a nice lady. When uncle gets out of the hospital a month later, there's no sign of worry about what's happened to his Dutch dependents. They don't seem overly upset at his absence either, even if they are happy when he finds them because at a news stand right outside the hospital he finds a magazine with a cover drawn by John Bowers' character of Mary Pickford's character.

Happens all the time.

For another annoyance, at the end, Mr. Bowers' father is about to be thrown out as president of the railroad unless he can get a right of way from Mary's uncle -- he doesn't know the relationship. He wires his estranged son -- John Bowers, of course -- and tells him that if he seduces the niece and gets the uncle to sign the papers, he'll remember him in his will. Where this assumption of character came from.....

Why was Mary Pickford, Paramount's biggest star, in such a stinker? Because every time Charlie Chaplin cut a deal for a bigger salary, for a studio of his own, for his own distribution system, Miss Pickford, according to her autobiography, batted her eyes at Adolph Zukor and got more money. And in order for Paramount to make money on her contract, they had to put her in more movies. Paramount would do this over and over again, sometimes working their stars to death, but more usually turning out so many movies that the public became tired of them -- at one point, you could find six Marx Brothers movies running simultaneously in Manhattan, from the nabes for a dime, up to first-run houses for 50 cents -- and no one would pay to see them for fifty cents when you could see them for a dime and so DUCK SOUP tanked.

Anyway, I digress. The technical aspects of this movie are fine for 1916. No money was spared for the production. The actors do their best. But it's still 90% you need a great script, and so this one is a lousy Pickford film. Even in Czech.