Mary Pickford, "America's Sweetheart", stars as Gwendolyn, an 11-year-old girl longing for her parents' affection. But mother is too busy with her afternoon tea parties, and father is contemplating suicide after a business deal gone bad. Even the servants have no time for the precocious child. So Gwendolyn takes an overdose of sleeping pills in a bid for attention. She is transported to "The Tell-Tale Forest of Broken Dreams", a fantastic world where her family and friends have taken on strange new forms. As the girl grows weaker and weaker, Death comes for her...and now only her parents' love can save Gwendolyn from an eternal rest...
Poor Little Girl is the first of the child roles that Mary Pickford would become famous for. Though Artcraft Pictures feared the film would be a flop, audiences had no difficulty accepting the actress, who was 25 at the time, as an 11-year-old. In fact, movie fans' desire to see Pickford in younger parts became a source of frustration for her in later years. "Through my professional creations," Mary once said, "I became, in a sense, my own baby." The script was written by Pickford's friend Frances Marion, later an Academy Award winner for The Big House (1930) and The Champ (1932). The nightmarish, hallucinatory ending of Poor Little Girl may have been an influence on director Maurice Tourneur's son Jacques, best known for Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and Out of the Past (1947).