SWEETHEART: The Story of Mary Pickford

Is America's Sweetheart nobody's sweetheart now? It's hard to say after the real success of the Lillian Gish book -- a realer book by far. For many it will be a surprise to think that she still is -- entombed in Pickfair (""a museum in waiting""), long taken to her bed where she watches Bonanza but still keeps a sharp tongue in her sharp head. For under all that curly-haired naivete, Mary, nee Gladys Smith in impecunious hard times, grew up shrewd and ambitious. This is a picture by part replay along with the story of her shorter and longer disastrous marriages to Owen Moore and Douglas Fairbanks respectively before she retired from films in 1933 (the first to realize she'd lucked out) and settled for the intensive care of Buddy Rogers. Windeler's account is not altogether sanitized (just think of that rosebud calling Louella ""a disloyal cunt"") but it's about as flat as his Julie Andrews (1970) although there are lots of photographs to compensate for the uncut Screen Gem stylelessness.