Already a Hollywood power player in 1926, producer and star Mary Pickford hoped to bring about change through Sparrows, William Beaudine's Southern Gothic melodrama. Upon its release, she would prove successful when new child labor laws came into effect. As an opening title explains, the children of unwed and abandoned mothers once ended up in baby farms where unscrupulous overseers would sell them illegally into adoption or slave labor.
The shifty-looking Mr. Grimes (Gustav von Seyffertitz) runs such an operation with his bedraggled wife (Charlotte Mineau) in a Louisiana-like swamp. Shortly after his introduction, Mr. Grimes crumples up a doll sent by a birth mother for her child and drops it in the mud to watch it sink below the sludge. With his dusty black outfit, pallid face, and hunched shoulders, he looks like a ghoul from out of a Hammer Horror. Pickford's Molly represents his opposite number.
Though critics balked in 2021 when 28-year-old Ben Platt played a high school student in the theatrical adaptation of the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen, Pickford was a seasoned 32-year-old when she played the oldest of Mr. Grimes' wards. Fortunately, the petite actress convinces as a teenager (admittedly aided by the absence of sound and color stock). The younger children may look to her as a caretaker, but they've been starting to lose hope that anyone will come to rescue them. They're hungry, they don't feel well, and they sleep in a barn. Molly insists things will improve if they continue to pray. She compares them to the sparrows of scripture, but they fear God cares more about birds than kids.
Though mature in most respects, she shares their rambunctious nature and enjoys foiling Grimes's bratty son, Ambrose (Spec O'Donnell), every chance she gets. In the meantime, Mr. Grimes expects them to farm the land and to stay out of his way. When Splutters (Monty O'Grady) makes himself visible during a visit from a hog buyer, the man leaves with a pig--and a boy "to pick pertater bugs."
One night, baby broker Bailey (Lloyd Whitlock) brings Mr. Grimes a curly-haired moppet he abducted from a wealthy widower. The new arrival heralds a move into thriller territory as the police become involved and Mr. Grimes scrambles to dispose of the tyke. The back half of the film revolves around a daring escape into a region filled with alligators and quicksand, predicting Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, before culminating in a fairytale-like ending.
Throughout, Oscar-winning cinematographers Hal Mohr (Phantom of the Opera) and Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise) fill the screen with lovely, poignant sequences, like the tiny hands waving goodbye to Splutters through the slats in the barn, while the orchestral score from Cameron and Taylor Graves reflects the many moods on display, from playful to foreboding. This sparkling restoration from the Library of Congress brings out the beauty in a richly atmospheric film that proves equally pulse-pounding and heart-rending. Highly recommended for silent film collections and film studies programs specializing in melodrama.