One of many silent-era films starring "America's Sweetheart" Mary Pickford which were later remade as Shirley Temple vehicles. Known as the "Girl with the Curls," Pickford's box-office hits included The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917) the film. In the mid-1930s 20th Century-Fox boss Darryl F. Zanuck re-purposed Pickford's films as vehicles for Temple and thus produced Poor Little Rich Girl (1936), Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938), The Little Princess (1939), etc. Zanuck also instructed studio publicists to use Pickford's persona and nicknames as a model for Temple's public image as a Hollywood starlet.
This was the first screen adaptation of the novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. This adaptation came 17 years after the novel was published.
Film debut of Josephine Hutchinson
Mary Pickford was two years older than Norman Kerry who played her father.