100% American
About 100% American
Mayme, played by Mary Pickford, is introduced as a thriftless girl who laughs off a bond speech at an amusement park. The pitch stays with her. She skips an ice-cream sundae and walks home to save a nickel toward Liberty Bond Day. By the end she can go, with her soldier boyfriend unexpectedly back, to a "100% American dance" open to servicemen and to civilians who have bought Liberty Bonds. A closing live-action cartoon puts Kaiser Wilhelm on a plank called the Hindenburg Line, loaded with bags labeled Militarism, Atrocities, Brute Force, and the Clown Prince. Mayme knocks him into the soup with a baseball marked 4th Liberty Loan.
Cast & crew
More about 100% American
Arthur Rosson directed this one-reel short for the Fourth Liberty Loan. Pickford gave her time. It was one of about 35 studio shorts released in September and October 1918. The U.S. release date reported for it is October 5, 1918.
Themes
Background
The Fourth Liberty Loan ran in the fall of 1918. Chaplin's The Bond was the best-known of the same batch of star shorts. This was Pickford's.
Making
Hugh McClung and Glen MacWilliams photographed it. The closing gag is a live-action cartoon staged at the amusement park Mayme passed up at the start.
Look
Hugh McClung and Glen MacWilliams shot the amusement-park speech and the walk home that is supposed to save Mayme a nickel.
Music
Silent on first release. Martin Marks wrote a piano score for the National Film Preservation Foundation's 2007 DVD.
Preservation
Mary Pickford gave a print to the Library of Congress, which holds it in the Mary Pickford Collection and struck a 35mm preservation copy. The National Film Preservation Foundation included it in Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934 (2007).
Notes
- Loretta Blake plays Tillie, Monte Blue plays Mayme's army boyfriend, and Henry Bergman and Ted Reed are also in the cast.
- When the short was used for Canada's own bond drive it was retitled 100% Canadian. Pickford was still a Canadian citizen.
- The week after the release, Famous Players-Lasky bought a full-page New York Times ad reprinting a thank-you from Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo under the line "The Silent Salesman of Liberty — motion pictures!
- The National Film Preservation Foundation copied the Library of Congress 35mm at 19 frames per second.
- Martin Marks's piano score for that DVD uses "Over There," "Keep the Home Fires Burning," and "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," among other period tunes.
Scenes
- Mayme turns down the sundae and walks instead of riding, counting the nickel toward Liberty Bond Day.
- She hits a cartoon Kaiser off the Hindenburg Line with a baseball labeled 4th Liberty Loan.
Also available
- Internet Archive (silent-one-hundred-percent-american)
- Treasures III: Social Issues in American Film, 1900–1934 (National Film Preservation Foundation, DVD, 2007)
