Her First Biscuits (1909)
Released 17th June 1909
By April 1909, D.W. Griffith, already an experienced director of over 100 short films, had become Biograph’s foremost creative talent. Among the huge number of homogenous shorts the movie industry churned out, his work alone stood out. Audiences had also noticed Biograph’s leading actress, Florence Lawrence, who played the lead in Her First Biscuits. To prevent higher wage demands, studios never revealed their players’ names, so fans dubbed her The Biograph Girl and anxiously awaited her every release.
They rarely had long to wait. Griffith alone made two movies each week. However, he rotated his stock company of actors, often handing the star of one picture a walk-on part in the next. Although most of his films were stand-alone works, he made a series of shorts featuring the Joneses. In these eleven comedies, Lawrence and her screen husband John R. Cumpson encountered various mishaps.
In Her First Biscuits, Mrs Jones delightedly presents to her husband the first batch of biscuits she has ever baked. Unfortunately, as we see from the anguished faces Cumpson pulls towards the camera, they taste awful. Finding them inedible, he disposes of the biscuits while his wife is out of the room and pretends they were so delicious he ate them all. Encouraged by his compliments, Mrs Jones bakes a second batch, which she leaves at her husband’s place of work, a theatrical booking agency. By this time, Jones is feeling so unwell he has retired to a room adjoining the office. While he nurses his upset stomach, various hungry out-of-work actors help themselves to the biscuits. They quickly succumb to the same malady as Mr Jones and join him in the adjoining room, which, before long, is bulging with ailing actor types.
Her First Biscuits still amuses if one can overlook the performers’ exaggerated gestures. Some overacting appears to be deliberate: the starving actors’ performances are much broader than those of the Joneses and Mr Jones’s secretary (Jeanie Macpherson). Griffith appears to have realised that the broad gestures that communicated emotion on the stage were inappropriate for the screen. Among his many other innovations, he would encourage actors to deliver more naturalistic performances.
The story’s single gag stretches a little thin, even for a seven-minute split-reel short. That wasn’t unusual for the day. It at least allows us to see many members of Griffith’s stock company sharing the screen. The director also employed sophisticated (for 1909) cross-cutting between four locations: the Jones’s lounge; their kitchen; the theatrical agency and the adjoining room.
If anyone remembers Her First Biscuits today, it is for the debut screen appearance of Mary Pickford, an actress who would dominate the box office for the next two decades. It wasn’t her first film to be released, however; according to the AFI, that was Two Memories, which also featured her sister, Lottie.
Pickford’s role as one of Mrs Jones’s many victims is tiny. Griffith shot the film on 20th April 1909, just one day after she reluctantly approached Biograph for work. He applied her makeup himself before the shoot. She thought the whiteface and heavy liner made her look like Pancho Villa. Pickford had performed for the legendary theatrical impresario David Belasco and considered the flickers beneath her. But despite her success on stage, she needed the $25 per week she had negotiated with Griffith; her mother and two younger siblings depended on her for their income.
Although her role was insignificant, Griffith saw something in Pickford he liked: immediately after completing Her First Biscuits, he offered her a lead role in The Violin Maker of Cremona.