The Poor Little Rich Girl

Mary Pickford, then twenty-five, plays eleven-year-old Gwendolyn, a wealthy girl whose parents are too busy with money and society to notice her. Raised by servants and kept at a distance from other children, Gwendolyn finally gets sent to school, where a lonely life collides with playground cruelty. A near-fatal dose of sleeping medicine tips the film into a celebrated dream sequence in which director Maurice Tourneur lets his visual imagination run loose. It was one of Pickford's biggest hits and the film that proved audiences would accept her as a child well into adulthood, paving the way for Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Pollyanna. Made in 1917, it is in the public domain.