Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley
About Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley
In San Francisco, Amarilly Jenkins looks after five brothers for her mother, the widowed scrubwoman Mrs. Americus Jenkins. She is engaged to bartender Terry McGowen. A fire costs her the job of theater scrubwoman, and Terry gets her work as a cigarette girl in his café. There she meets Gordon Phillips, a rich sculptor. Terry breaks the engagement. Gordon's aunt, Mrs. David Phillips, takes Amarilly in, and a scarlet-fever quarantine gives the aunt time to teach her rich manners as a kind of experiment. When the aunt sees that Gordon loves the girl, she invites the Jenkins family to a party to humiliate them. Amarilly walks out, asks Terry to supper, and he buys fifty-cent violets on the way. He is shot, reaches her door, and survives. She tells him they have a date at City Hall. Five years later they ride his motorbike, Amarilly in the sidecar with a baby under the blanket and a small boy behind Terry.
Cast & crew
More about Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley
Marshall Neilan directed. Frances Marion adapted Belle K. Maniates's 1915 novel. Adolph Zukor produced, and Walter Stradling photographed it. Artcraft released it on March 11, 1918.
Themes
Making
Marion and Neilan were also the writer and director of Pickford's Stella Maris, released two months earlier. This one stays a comedy: the rich aunt's lesson fails, and the last shot is the motorbike and the children.
Look
Walter Stradling shot the alley, the café, and the Phillips house as separate worlds in the same city.
Preservation
A print is on the Internet Archive.
Notes
- Mary Pickford plays Amarilly. William Scott plays Terry McGowen. Kate Price plays Mrs. Americus Jenkins. Norman Kerry plays Gordon Phillips. Ida Waterman plays Mrs. David Phillips.
- Wesley Barry, Frank Butterworth, George Hackathorne, and Antrim Short play brothers, several of them uncredited.
- The Chicago Board of Censors cut a close-up of money in a man's hand in reel 1, and, in reel 4, a maid opening the door of an alleged house of ill fame.
- Terry passes up violets at 15 cents and then buys a bunch at 50 cents after Amarilly asks him to supper.
- Herbert Standing appears, uncredited, as Father Riordan. Gustav von Seyffertitz plays a surgeon.
Scenes
- Mrs. Phillips invites the Jenkins family to a party meant to shame Amarilly back out of the house.
- Terry, shot on the way over with the violets, collapses at Amarilly's door and lives.
- Five years on, a baby rides under the sidecar blanket and a boy sits behind Terry on the motorbike.
Influenced by
- Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley, the 1915 novel by Belle K. Maniates
Also available
- Internet Archive (AmarillyOfClothes-lineAlley1918MaryPickfordMarshallNeilanSilent)
