The New York Hat (1912)

This is one of my favorites among Griffith’s Biograph films, and it is amazing what a world of difference there is between this small-town comedy of manners and the shady, pre-expressionist world of The Musketeers of Pig Alley, made just a few weeks before. The variety of genres that Griffith explored - and helped to define - is truly staggering. What’s even more impressive is the assured sense that what is by now his complete professionalism allows him to present such a masterly stamp on works of quite various sensibilities and tone.

The New York Hat stars a 20-year-old Mary Pickford (easily playing a much younger teen) whose mother (Kate Bruce) dies in the opening scene. Before she passes, however, she manages to slip a box to the attending minister, played by Lionel Barrymore. Back in his church office, the minister opens the box to discover some money, along with a note requesting him to buy her daughter Mary a few fineries that her tightwad father would never allow her to have.

A little later, we see young, beautiful Mary dreaming of having a new hat. She asks the old skinflint (Charles Hill Mailes - also the father in The Painted Lady, a skinny nanny goat of an old man with a pointed beard that looks as though it were ready to discharge) if she could possibly get one, but the old geezer brushes her off.

Meanwhile, the ladies of the town are all abuzz concerning the new arrival of an elaborately fashioned hat from New York at the local store, a feathered affair costing the ridiculously exorbitant price of $10. Barrymore observes Pickford admiring the hat through the window, and once she departs, he enters the store and purchases it, much to the shock and inflamed curiosity of the old biddies inside. Who is the object of the handsome young preacher’s affection?

Lionel Barrymore gives an outstanding performance as the minister. His humaneness contrasts eloquently against the fussy, petty self-importance of his fellow town members (and parishioners). Those who are only familiar with the older Barrymore, playing confined to a wheelchair in the 1930s and ‘40s will be amazed at the outsized charisma of this wonderful actor. His portrayal is a masterpiece of understated kindness and empathy, and his intelligent magnaminity places him far above his fellows, yet he does not deign to condescend to them. He is wonderfully human, as displayed by the involuntary laughter he releases on first discovering the letter, as well as the quite sincere look of concern that he exhibits when the situation becomes convoluted and the town is in hysterics. One gets the impression that he cares not so much for clearing his reputation as he is for both exonerating Mary and putting his fussy, outraged town members at ease.

Mary Pickford is splendidly beautiful, absolutely coquettish in her girlish innocence. When the fabulous hat arrives at her home without explanation, she gushes with wonder, much like a surprised Cinderella, then playfully admires herself in the mirror, wearing the ostentatious bonnet.

Of course, she cannot explain the hat to her father, so she lets him go on ahead to church on Sunday morning. She delays, donning the beautiful hat and follows after. Naturally, when she gets to the church, the elaborate headpiece turns everyone’s head, standing out as it does like a grand May festival in the midst of a dowdy February of plain-town fashion.

Knowing that the hat had been purchased by the minister, the holier-than-thou gossips (led by the marvelously parsimonious Claire McDowell (the Spinster of The Sunbeam), begin to swelter in the heat of their fastidiously incensed sense of proprietary outrage. After the service, they call together the entire church board, consisting of themselves, as well and assemblage fuddy-duddy old geezers (presumably their husbands), and it is decided that the minister must make a reckoning.

First they encounter Mary’s crotchety old father who is absolutely scandalized at hearing the news. He rushes home, finds the beautiful new hat, and to Mary’s horror, pulverizes it in a fit of self-righteous indignation. Beside herself with shock and grief, Mary insists that she does not know where the hat came from, but the old billy-goat gruff refuses to believe her. He rushes down to the church to confront the minister for himself.

Meanwhile, public indignity has been brought to a boil, and the members of the church board hammer away at the minister’s office door. Faced with this ridiculous mob, he tries to restore calm. When the old father arrives to join the fray, he reluctantly pulls out Mary’s poor mother’s note and lets them read it. Chastened by the guilt of their judgmental self effrontery, the church board slips home in quiet embarrassment. The men sniff indignantly at the gossipy biddies as they step away from them outside, forgetting that their own sense of moral outrage had been so recently kindled as well.

Back in the office, Mary arrives, and the minister lets her see the note, and she is shocked to discover that it was the minister himself that had purchased the hat for her, with the savings left by her dead mother. The minister finally gets the old miser to agree to allow him provide Mary with occasional frills - why not? it’s not costing the old bugger anything - and the film concludes happily.

Griffith has such a reputation for being morally and socially Victorian, so The New York Hat is a welcome revelation of his larger concerns for legitimate human values as contrasted against "proper" social hypocrisy. Special credit, though, must go to the co-writers of the screenplay, both of them women.

Anita Loos wrote the story - she had debuted in film writing by collaborating with Griffith on The Musketeers of Pig Alley, no less. Also receiving a co-writing credit on this, her first project, is Frances Marion, who would go on to become possibly the most renowned female writer in Hollywood, penning scripts for Mary Pickford, among others, up until the 1930s. It is undoubtedly true that the penetrating insights of these two, uniquely observant females must have provided a great deal of the insight into the perspective of this drama. But it is also a fact that Griffith not only embraced their story, but gave it a coherent vision through his mis-en-scene and his deft direction of the actors.

This movie is an absolute delight and very revelatory in the way that Griffith (and others) would treat the situations of women. One of the delights in the film is in the first line of Mary’s late mother in her letter to the minister: "My husband worked me to death." I think only a woman would have been perceptive and witty enough to write this, and no doubt the many women in the audience could too easily relate to it.