Directed by: Sam Taylor
Starring: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Edwin Maxwell, Joseph Cawthorn, Clyde Cook, Geoffrey Wardwell, Dorothy Jordan
Based on the play by: William Shakespeare

STORY

Before Hollywood had quite figured out what to do with the revolutionary new world of talking pictures, two of the most powerful independent artists in motion-picture history decided to take on the greatest playwright in the English language.
William Shakespeare's battle of the sexes comes roaring into the sound era as the formidable Katherine, played by Mary Pickford, meets the one man audacious enough to challenge her: Petruchio, played with swaggering physicality by Douglas Fairbanks. Katherine's younger sister Bianca cannot marry until Katherine does, and Petruchio — attracted by both the challenge and the promised dowry — decides that the famously tempestuous woman will become his bride.
What follows is less a courtship than a collision.
Pickford's Katherine is fierce, intelligent and gloriously unwilling to surrender quietly, while Fairbanks attacks Petruchio with the tremendous physical presence that had made him one of the silent screen's greatest stars. Their confrontations turn Shakespeare's comedy into something remarkably cinematic: part verbal joust, part physical comedy, part marital warfare.
And then there are the words.
This is precisely why The Taming of the Shrew matters in the history of Shakespeare on film. Audiences were no longer merely reading Shakespeare's dialogue on title cards. They could hear it. AFI identifies the picture as the first feature-length sound adaptation of Shakespeare, created during the extraordinary moment when Hollywood itself was learning how the spoken word could become part of cinema.
For AIN, however, there is another wonderful piece of this story.
This isn't simply early Shakespeare on film.

It is also independent filmmaking history.

Pickford and Fairbanks weren't merely movie stars working for somebody else's studio. Pickford produced the picture through the Pickford Corporation, alongside the Elton Corporation, with distribution through United Artists — the company Pickford and Fairbanks had famously founded with Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith so filmmakers could exert greater control over their own work. AFI confirms the Pickford Corporation and Elton Corporation as the production companies and United Artists as distributor; the Mary Pickford Foundation credits Pickford herself as producer.

Nearly a century before Absolutely Indie Network was created by an independent filmmaker for independent filmmakers, Pickford and Fairbanks were already fighting one of the battles at the heart of independent cinema:
Who gets to control the work?
That makes The Taming of the Shrew more than an Absolutely Classics treasure.
It makes it part of AIN's family tree.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS

THE KING AND QUEEN OF HOLLYWOOD — TOGETHER AT LAST

For all their fame as Hollywood's most celebrated married couple, The Taming of the Shrew was the only feature film in which Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks co-starred.
Two enormous stars. One marriage. One movie.

SHAKESPEARE FINDS HIS VOICE
Earlier filmmakers had brought Shakespeare to the screen, but The Taming of the Shrew represented something fundamentally different. This was conceived as a sound production, and AFI notes its distinction as the first feature-length sound adaptation of Shakespeare. A silent version was also prepared because many theaters still hadn't converted to sound.
Cinema was changing beneath their feet.

TWO INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS WHO CHANGED HOLLYWOOD
Pickford and Fairbanks were not simply actors with enormous box-office power. They were entrepreneurs who had helped create United Artists, giving major filmmakers an alternative to surrendering control of their pictures to conventional studios.
And on Shrew, Pickford wasn't merely Katherine.
She was the producer.
For an independent filmmaker watching in the twenty-first century, that may be one of the most fascinating credits in the entire picture.

PICKFORD'S LITTLE REVOLUTION
Watch Katherine carefully near the conclusion.
During the famous speech about a wife's obedience, Pickford makes a wonderfully subversive choice: Katherine secretly winks at Bianca.
Petruchio doesn't see it.
Bianca does.
Suddenly the question becomes: Has Katherine really been tamed — or has Katherine simply learned how to play the game better than everybody else? The gesture is documented in accounts of the production and radically complicates the apparent meaning of the scene.
That's acting.
One tiny gesture can rewrite an entire speech.

THEIR FAIRY-TALE MARRIAGE WAS FALTERING
There is bittersweet history behind all that onscreen combat. By the time Pickford and Fairbanks made the film, their celebrated marriage was deteriorating, and accounts describe considerable tension during production. Pickford later remembered making the film unhappily — while still acknowledging the quality of Fairbanks's performance.
Knowing that makes Katherine and Petruchio's battles fascinating on another level: two legendary performers playing a couple locked in combat while their own relationship was beginning to fracture.

THE ARTISTS BEHIND THE STARS
The craftsmanship surrounding them was formidable. Karl Struss, an Academy Award-winning cinematographer, photographed the film, while production design involved William Cameron Menzies, one of the great visual architects of classical Hollywood.
Even at the dawn of talking pictures, filmmaking remained exactly what it has always been:
A collaboration between artists.

AN AIN CLASSIC FOR MORE THAN ONE REASON
Shakespeare gives the film its language. Pickford gives Katherine her intelligence. Fairbanks gives Petruchio his enormous physical vitality. Sound gives Shakespeare something silent cinema could never completely provide — his voice.
But perhaps the most fitting AINtoid of all is that behind this Shakespearean experiment stood Mary Pickford: actress, producer, businesswoman and one of the architects of a company created to give artists greater control of their own work.

The technology may have changed enormously since 1929.
The independent filmmaker's desire to own the vision has not.