The Family Secret

The Family Secret is an early film adaptation of a popular 19th century melodrama. The plot concerns the daughter of a wealthy man who has secretly married a man below her station of whom her father violently disapproves. The father, in an excess of parental concern, separates the lovers by sending his daughter away so that she might forget her inamorata, unaware of their married state; during this time, she gives birth to a daughter. After some months, the young mother returns to her family manor and presents her father with his new granddaughter, which causes a most unfortunate scene. Unbeknownst to the young woman, her enraged father falsely accuses his son-in-law of theft and has him incarcerated in order to separate the lovers in an irrational attempt to force his daughter to forget this "unworthy" young man.

Three and a half years pass, the imprisoned son-in-law is released, the no-less-imprisoned mother is languishing for her husband (long believed dead), and Baby Peggy bursts upon the scene as the charming young daughter (suffering under the neglect of her governess and the abuse of her mother's nurse), ready to tackle her family-in-crisis with her youthful exuberance and charm... if only she can escape from the nursery! The remainder of the movie is a very peculiar mix of slapstick comedy and melodramatic, sentimental weepiness which the 5-year-old Baby Peggy handles with surprisingly mature professionalism and charm. It's easy to see why this little girl was such a big star.

Edward Earle as the wronged son-in-law is very sympathetic and underplays his scenes in a relatively modern manner which plays well today. Gladys Hulette as the languishing young mother is surprisingly sympathetic for someone who spends most of the picture fainting or throwing her hands to her forehead in antiquated gestures of despair. Frank Currier is effective as the tyrannical father who eventually comes to see the error of his ways in the flash of enlightenment which adorable young children seem inevitably to bring to hopeless old codgers in these sorts of affairs. I enjoyed most the character actresses like Lucy Beaumont as the stuffy Aunt (with her tea parties for her legions of antiquated old fidgets) and the actress who played Baby Peggy's prune-faced governess with her heart melting only for the revolting utterances of the characters in her nauseating romantic penny-dreadfuls. The film was full of little bits of delightful character comedy which I found enchanting.

This film stands in a silent-movie crossroads of sorts. On one hand, we have melodramatic, overplayed scenes of Victorian sentimentality with a somewhat unconvincing storyline; on the other, we have charming pieces of physical and character comedy which are a lot of fun and feel more contemporary with the making of the film, even timeless. William Seiter, who later directed some very enjoyable films (like Roberta, You Were Never Lovelier, and the Marx Brothers' Room Service), seems lost here, trying to reconcile these oddly dissimilar styles into a unified whole. The film doesn't quite gel, but it has many entertaining moments which hold up well.

I had the privilege of seeing a clean vintage print of this film today in Niles, CA on the big screen, introduced by Baby Peggy herself (Diana Serra Cary, a very spry nonagenarian), with an excellent accompanist on piano. It was a great experience, not only because we got to hear Mrs. Cary speak about making her movies, but because I was able to devote my full attention to the film and I could see and appreciate all the details. But be prepared: although it has much wonderful comedy, entertaining performances and a lot of fun camp value (a la Attack of the 50 foot Woman), the film as a whole is supposed to be a drama and as such is not very convincing, although reasonably well paced. This is a curiosity, not a great film... but well worth watching if you're looking for a glimpse into this last gasp of the Edwardian era.

(I know, the Edwardian Era ended in 1910... but this film, despite being set in and made in 1923, FEELS Edwardian to the core.)

The plot of "The Family Secret" abounds with ridiculous and improbable situations. Yet, for one reason I think it's still worth seeing--the adorable Baby Peggy. Otherwise, it's kind of a dumb picture.

When the film begins a young lady is in love with a man but her parents don't approve. You get the impression they wouldn't approve of anyone, as they are nasty old cranks. The father arranges for his daughter to leave on a trip for several months---hoping that during that time, she'll forget all about the guy. When she returns, however, she has a baby and then announces she secretly married the guy some time ago!! Huh?! If she WAS married, why did she leave?! And why didn't she tell her folks?! Anyway, the husband soon arrives and the nasty father arranges for the guy to get arrested and they poor schmuck is sent to prison(?). Years pass and the wife doesn't realize her husband was in prison(?)--she thinks he just ran away because her family was so nasty. What's next is even more ridiculous and improbable but it happens when this baby has grown into one of the most adorable kids in film history, Peggy! What's next? Who cares...just watch the kid, she's adorable.

A totally muddled movie with a plot that fails to make any sense at all is Universal's Baby Peggy vehicle, "The Family Secret" (1924). The plot revolves around the fact that the hero is sent to jail for three and a half years for visiting his wife without his father-in-law's permission. As the wife was 29 years old at the time, I would not have thought such permission was necessary, but obviously New York (as painted in this film) is a city where Lewis Carroll wrote the statutes and everything is topsy-turvy. Or maybe the husband, as glibly portrayed by Edward Earle, is actually a cleverly disguised moron. He dresses neatly and seems to have a good job, doesn't foam at the mouth or do anything crazy except to allow himself to be sent to jail for visiting his wife. True, the sanity of the wife, as played by Gladys Hulette, is definitely suspect. She faints all the time, fails to come to her husband's defense, is easily deceived by her father and most certainly has a vacuous look about her in many a misty close-up. Sad to say, the child of a couple of morons is sometimes herself mentally retarded – and that's exactly how she is portrayed in this movie by Baby Peggy, although audiences in 1924 obviously found her moronic escapades amusing rather than pitiable. William A. Seiter directed with an obviously disinterested hand.

The child star here, Baby Peggy, who as of this posting is 100 years old and counting and going by the name of Diana Serra Cary in her adult career as a writer, has an interesting life story that's been chronicled in the documentary "Baby Peggy, the Elephant in the Room" (2012), as well as in her autobiography, "What Ever Happened to Baby Peggy?" As for this feature-length film starring her, it's a dated and flimsy melodrama mixed with some slightly amusing scenes of Peggy, who unfortunately doesn't appear until a third of the way through the roughly one-hour-long restored print. Without her, the picture suffers from the preposterous stupidity of the adult characters. Of some note, however, is the repetition of the narrative.

Narratives that mirror themselves aren't uncommon, but they usually aren't as simple and short as this one. The family's patriarch Simon Selfridge refuses to allow the marriage of his daughter, Margaret, to Garry, for... reasons, I guess. Garry and Margaret allow this rich old buzzard to dictate terms to them instead of living on their own with their baby because... well, that's a good question, actually--I don't know why, and it doesn't seem that the filmmakers did either. Anyways, after being kicked out, Garry sneaks into the Selfridge house at night, whereupon Simon has him arrested, Gary assaults a policeman and Margaret faints (again). Skip three-and-a-half years, when Garry is released from his prison sentence, and the film begins to pick up thanks to the charms of Baby Peggy, who eventually melts the heart of grandfather Simon, too.

Besides Margaret fainting twice, the narrative repeats itself with two baths (Peggy and then her dog), two scenes of Peggy making a mess in the house (first with a toy train and food and, later, with the fleas of her new dog--hence the baths). There's also the necklace with the wedding ring, which is shown early on and figures prominently in a later flashback, and Garry even manages to unlawfully enter a Selfridge house through a window for a second time. Thus, the first third of the film has Simon making a mess of things, while the third act offers the prospect of redemption through repetition.

The story, however, is mostly ridiculous. Margaret is such a vacuous idiot that she's misled to believe that her husband has disappeared rather than been sentenced to prison, and she allows her nurse, which she has, presumably, due to her fainting spells or severe stupidity, to prevent her from seeing her daughter. One would need to be able to read a newspaper and have an ounce of will power to do otherwise. There's also some bland, if not necessarily very offensive, humor involving black servants and immigrants and the intertitles mimicking their supposed dialects ("I done got her a present," for example, being the first words attributed to "Uncle Mose"). The plot of Baby Peggy running away from home and briefly living among the working class, including trading her dress for a more modest one and a banana, doesn't take any opportunity for social commentary and, instead, merely seems to serve advancing the plot. At least, it's short and briskly paced--even choppy, the ludicrous melodrama is partially alleviated by the cutesy kiddie stuff, and the plot reflects itself succinctly.

I just watched this movie, and I'm still quivering with revulsion. The script was way-over-the-top melodramatic, and the acting of the entire cast more than matched it. Further, the relentlessly cutesy Baby Peggy was an extraordinary irritant, matched only by the sheer idiocy of the character of her supposedly loving mother, who let her own hateful father dictate the misery of her life. A cThis would