The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

According to his autobiography The Little American is the film that Cecil B. DeMille wanted to make with Mary Pickford. Both were strong supporters of the Allied cause in World War I. But Adolph Zukor wanted a box office draw with a western so A Romance Of The Redwoods was done first. DeMille envisioned The Little American as part of his contribution to the propaganda war effort. And Pickford was well known for her bond tours with her husband Douglas Fairbanks.The Little American has Mary Pickford a daughter of the a US Senator and being courted by two men, German-American Jack Holt who receives orders to return to the Fatherland for an officer's commission in the newly declared war and French diplomat Raymond Hatton similarly ordered home. Pickford's family has a château in France and she travels there to be a nurse. But her ocean liner is torpedoed like the Lusitania and she eventually gets there.But as it turns out the château is in German occupied territory and she's asked to do a little espionage. And who do you think is among the Germans occupying, none other than Holt.As this was a film that DeMille himself labels a contribution to the war effort a lot of it can be dismissed. Pickford was her heroic best as The Little American. Some aspects of the real life Edith Cavell story are incorporated here with a lot more happy ending.As for the German atrocities. They'd have to wait until the next war when Hollywood couldn't make up what they did in real life.

When the US entered World War I, the government forced Hollywood to churn out propaganda films. THE LITTLE American is probably the best of the lot because it stars Mary Pickford.Pickford plays a young woman torn between two men: Jack Holt (German) and Raymond Hatton (French), but her decision is delayed because of the war as both men enlist.When the ship Pickford is sailing on is sunk by the Germans (think Lusitania) because it is carrying munitions, Pickford has a great scene as she stands on the lifeboat and yells at the German commander. Later on, of course, she runs into both Holt and Hatton when she is being held as a war prisoner at a château.Director Cecil B. DeMille provides one truly great scene in this film as Pickford and Holt are wandering through a bombed-out village. They pass a destroyed church of which only one wall remains standing. Against the wall is a very large crucifix. As they stand and watch, the wall collapses but the Jesus figure remains, suspended in mid air. It's a very surreal moment in a film that is otherwise very straightforward and un-artsy.Pickford is, as always, a pleasure to watch. She was always a very natural actress who avoided the arm-waving histrionics many other actors of the day used. She's also very very pretty. Holt is very good here in a leading-man role. Hatton is OK. Among the list of name actors in "extra" parts are Wallace Beery, Ramon Novarro, Colleen Moore, Ben Alexander, Hobart Bosworth, Norman Kerry, Walter Long, James Neill, and Edythe Chapman.Not a great film, but interesting to see US propaganda at work.

(SPOILERS IN FIRST PARAGRAPH) This movie's anti-German sentiment seems painfully dated now, but it's a brilliant example of great war-time propaganda. It was made back when Cecil B. DeMille was still a great director. (Ignore all his later Best Picture Academy Awards; he never made a very good sound film.) This movie lacks the comedy of most of Pickford's other films, and really it was DeMille's movie, not Pickford's. The vilification of the Germans can be compared to the way "The Patriot" of 2000 did the same to the British. The only good German in the film was a reluctant villain who had the ironic name of Austreheim. They even had Pickford take an ill-fated trip on a luxury ship that gets torpedoed by a German submarine. So what'll get the Americans more stirred up to war? The sinking of the Lusitania, or watching America's favorite Canadian import sinking in it? All throughout the film DeMille runs his protagonist from one kind of horrible calamity to another, barely escaping death, hypothermia, depravity, rape, execution, and explosions that go off in just the right place to keep her unharmed. The way she is saved from a firing squad is no more believable than the way the humans in "Jurassic Park" were ultimately rescued from the velociraptors. If I was any more gullible to such propaganda I would punish myself for having a part-German ancestry. Was it a good film? Aside from a humorous running gag about Americans abroad thinking they're untouchable – that was apparently a joke even back then – you might not be entertained. You'll find it more than a little melodramatic, and obviously one-sided, but the first thing that came to my mind after watching it is that it was years before Potemkin's false portrayal of a massacre revolutionized the language of cinema as well as a movie's potential for propaganda. It made me wonder: what became of Cecil B. DeMille? Somewhere between the advent of sound and "The Greatest Show on Earth" he seemed to lose his ambition. Ben Hur looked expensive, but not ambitious. In a sentence, this movie is for 1) Film historians, 2) Silent Film Buffs, 3) Mary Pickford fans, or 4) DeMille fans, if such a person exists.

This film is blatantly an anti-German propaganda film to which audiences flocked because America declared war on Germany a few months before its release. It's very effective even today, as I found myself despising the Germans for their actions, which included killing civilians and raping some women. Mary Pickford plays the title character, uncharacteristically a grown woman instead of a child she played in most of her films during the silent era. She is wooed by German-American Jack Holt and French-American Raymond Hatton when war breaks out in 1914. The Germans are depicted as being overly brutal.There was one scene that made me laugh, when the Germans break the door down to enter her aunt's home. Mary tells them in deadly ernest while waving a small American flag, "Gentlemen - you are breaking into the home of an American citizen - I must ask you to leave." The Germans, led by Walter Long, roared with laughter too. I couldn't decide if it was comic relief or if you were suppose to sympathize with Mary.I rather enjoyed the film for what it was. It was paced well by DeMille and the acting was fine but typical of early silents. Walter Long made a good heavy - he can sneer with the best of them.You may notice in the cast list some famous names (Wallace Beery, Ramon Novarro, etc.) without character names. You never actually see these actors, but they are known to have been in the film from various writings, including DeMille's autobiography.