Marion Mack's screen career comes down to one part, and the part is written against her. As Annabelle Lee in The General she is the obstacle Buster Keaton has to work around, and she plays it with enough sincerity and physical nerve to be worth watching anyway.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Marion Mack does with her face in the cab of the locomotive in The General (1926). Annabelle Lee is handed jobs she cannot do and she does each of them wrong with complete conviction. Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman wrote her as a nuisance, and the laughs at her expense are real ones. What Mack adds is that Annabelle never knows she is the joke. She is trying, and it shows, and that is the only reason the romance is not simply an irritation between train sequences.
She came to it from slapstick. Mack started in 1921 as one of Mack Sennett's bathing beauties, working in shorts under other names, and by 1923 she had taken the name Marion Mack and co-written and starred in Mary of the Movies, a feature about a girl trying to get into pictures. Leads followed in One of the Bravest (1925) and Carnival Girl (1926). Then came six months on location with Keaton, one more film, Alice in Movieland (1928), and she stopped acting altogether. Later she wrote short subjects with her husband, the producer Louis Lewyn, and from the late 1940s she sold houses in California.
So the case rests on Annabelle, and the case is stronger than the script. Keaton's heroines were not usually asked to do much, and Mack did a great deal: she is on the moving train, on top of it and in the way of it, and she did that work herself rather than leaving it to someone in a wig. The grace is a leading lady's; the timing is a Sennett girl's. When the film needs her to be a proper hindrance, she is a proper hindrance, and when it briefly needs her to be brave, she is that too, without any visible gear change.
We will admit that on a second viewing we minded about her more than the film wanted us to. Keaton has arranged things so that our worry goes to the engine, and it does, but Mack plays a woman doing her best in a situation nobody has explained to her, and there is something touching in that even when the picture is laughing. She said afterwards that Buster was always playing jokes on everybody, practical jokes, and a little of that seems to have got onto the screen.
We cannot tell you what she was like in Mary of the Movies or Alice in Movieland, and nor, at this distance, can most people. What survives is one performance in a great film, in a part that keeps trying to make her ridiculous. See The General for the trains, as everyone does, and then watch her for a few minutes instead. She is working harder than the script deserves.
Biography
Marion Mack (born Joey Marion McCreery) was an American actress and screenwriter. She began her career in Hollywood in 1920 as one of Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties and appeared in short subjects before taking leading roles in features such as Mary of the Movies (1923), One of the Bravest (1925) and Carnival Girl (1926).
She is best known for playing Annabelle Lee opposite Buster Keaton in the 1926 silent comedy The General. Mack retired from acting after her final film, Alice in Movieland (1928). She later wrote screenplays for short subjects and worked in real estate. She was married to producer Louis Lewyn from 1924 until his death in 1969.
