Just a Shabby Doll (1913) User Reviews

Early Sentimental Entertainment

[PamelaShort · 6/10 · 31 July 2014]

This story begins with a very young little girl asking why Papa loves the shabby doll. He sets her on his lap and begins to tell the story about the old shabby doll. In a delightful series of neatly flowing flashbacks, he tells his young daughter about his life and how he met her mother. We learn they met as children, he was poor and she was rich. He buys her a doll for Christmas from his savings selling newspapers. As they grow, so does their love for each other, but he is still too poor to marry and support her, so he heads West to make his fortune. Meanwhile, the girls's bankrupt father dies and she leaves her life of luxury. The young man has indeed made a fortune and comes back East to find her. Eventually it is the shabby doll that happily reunites them. Cleverly effective slight melodrama, has you believing the child's mother, his wife is dead and all he has to remember her is the cherished shabby doll. But at the end of the story , the wife enters the room and scoops the child in her arms and tucks her into bed, returning to the side of her loving husband.

A simple story that is convincingly told in only one reel, with wonderful views of 1913 New York City in the background. The cinematography of this picture is of very high quality for the time and the direction of the principle players is natural in their acting. Produced by the Thanhouser Company with Harry Benham as the father, Mignon Anderson as the mother and little Helen Badgley playing their young daughter. Just a Shabby Doll is a sentimentally entertaining example of a popular early silent film storyline.

A simple, natural story

[deickemeyer · 8 August 2017]

Here is a clear-cut story with a strong heart interest. The father, with his child and her doll on his knee, tells the tale of his rise in life from a newsboy. He rescued a little girl from peril and gave her a doll, which she always treasured. In later years the doll brings them together and they are married. Washington Square and other New York views appear in the film. A simple, natural story which will make friends for itself wherever shown. - The Moving Picture World, March 15, 1913

A Little Paper Boy

[kidboots · 9/10 · 27 March 2015]

Quite a complex little romance as a father tells his little daughter why he holds such a shabby doll in such high regard. The story is told in flashback and very smoothly done - the father was once a paper boy who helps a little girl when she slips on the street. They become friends and at Christmas he uses his treasured savings to buy her a doll - her very favourite present. In gratitude the father takes the boy into his office but as he reaches manhood he realises he is too poor to marry so he goes West to make his fortune. All the while the film is cutting back to his conversation with his beloved daughter. There is even a flashback within a flashback as the couple, realising they may never marry, remember happier times when they were children.

They lose contact, he is laid up with a fever and she vanishes as her father dies a bankrupt. Years later it is the shabby doll that brings them together - he, now well and healthy, is at the home of a friend when a little girl brings out the old doll that she found in the trunk of her governess!! The ending shows the loving family grouped around the fireside - the mother, the little girl who all those years before took the doll to her heart.

Beautifully named Mignon Anderson was one of the original group of Thanhouser stock players and was thought so highly of that she was given the lead role in one of the company's first features "The Mill on the Floss"(1915) but she married her leading man the same year and eventually drifted from the movies. Once again Marie Eline (Thanhouser's resident child star) has the role of the little girl who wins the paper boy's heart and Helen Badgley (who would not win any acting awards) the present day child.

Flashback-within-Flashback

[Cineanalyst · 6 November 2009]

The story in this one-reel short "Just a Shabby Doll" is uninterestingly sappy: daddy tells his daughter how he met and eventually married mommy. The construction of the narrative, however, is somewhat impressive. The story is told in flashback, from the perspective of the father, with scenes of him telling the story to his daughter cut between flashback scenes, with dialogue intertitles of him relating the events connecting the construction. In one scene, there's even a flashback (a superimposed image) within the flashback; the flashback-within-the-flashback is actually a scene we had previously seen. Flashbacks had been used quite a bit in movies by this time, but their extended employment here is, nevertheless, innovative.