America entered World War One in April 1917 after almost three years of brutal fighting between England, France and their allies and Germany and its alliance. The first Hollywood so-called propaganda film released soon after Congress declared war on Germany and the Central Powers was Cecil B. DeMille's July 1917 "The Little American," starring Mary Pickford.
Its director DeMille had lost a good friend in the sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine two years earlier, while Canadian Pickford had seen her native country involved in the war since 1914. Both were ardent supporters of the United States' war effort, and both eagerly participated in a movie that painted the Germans simply as barbarians. The Chicago Board of Censors, in fact, was so concerned about the city's large German-American population that it banned the movie from being shown. Two court rulings eventually overturned the censor board's prohibition from exhibiting "The Little American."
The Jeanne McPherson script does soften the anti-German edges somewhat by creating a young German residing in America as a paramour to Pickford. Karl Von Austreim, played by Jack Holt, is summoned by Germany in the fall of 1914 to join his regiment in Europe. The two lovers depart, only to once again meet on the battlefields of the Western Front. She's seen nursing several injured French soldiers after visiting her aunt in France, who had just died of natural causes near the fighting. Pickford ends up becoming a spy for the French, pinpointing important German artillery on her aunt's property. It is there she meets her old boyfriend, and he ends up becoming a protector for her.
While the film is praised for its recreation of a British liner's sinking by German hands, of which Pickford's character was a passenger, the movie failed to garner the enormous profits for the Mary Pickford Company, through its distribution branch Aircraft Pictures. This is the second and final picture DeMille directed with the popular actress. The first, released a couple months before in "A Romance of the Redwoods," was studio head Adolph Zukor's solution for a career correction for Pickford after viewing the preview of her last film, "The Poor Little Rich Girl." He saw the movie as being a total dud. Despite the actress having a clause in her contract giving her total control over her productions, Zukor felt DeMille's steady, serious hand would straighten her out. Of course "The Poor Little Rich Girl" ended up an enormous hit, and she would revert back to playing a kid again in her next two movies after "The Little American." To be fair, "Redwoods," on the basis of Pickford's star power, became the fourth highest grossing movie of the year.
Meanwhile, the two movies with DeMille spelled doom for her ongoing, unhappy marriage to actor Owen Moore, as well as making it easier in her clandestine romance with Douglas Fairbanks, whom she had met two years earlier at a Tarrytown, N. Y. party. The filming locations of "Redwoods" and "American" took place in southern California, where the married Fairbanks resided. Pickford had been living near her studio in Ft. Lee, N. J. before relocating out West. She would never live in the East ever again.
Returning to "A Little American:" Even a MacPherson script, co-written by DeMille, couldn't quite rescue "A Little American." MacPherson and the director formed one of the more successful and influential working partnerships in Hollywood. As an actress as well as a minor director and scriptwriter, she approached DeMille for an acting job in 1914. Instead, the director, realizing her scenario talents, hired her as a screenwriter. She went on to write 30 of DeMille's first 34 movie scripts, with her last screenplay for the director in 1930's "Madam Satan."
