On a Monday night in December of 2012 (December 3rd, for those of you keeping strict accounts), The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ premiered a documentary on actress-author Diana Serra Cary—who in the 1920s was second in popularity to movie moppet Jackie Coogan as silver screen favorite “Baby Peggy” Montgomery. Entitled Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room (and directed by Vera Iwerebor), the presentation was also accompanied by showings of three of Cary’s "Peggy" short subjects and the 1924 silent feature Captain January. I mentioned previously in this blog post that I caught most of the doc and two of the three shorts when they aired but that I was disappointed that I wasn’t able to see January (well, my father has a rendezvous with Kindly Doc Maddow weeknights at 9...there's not much I can do about that).
That disappointment has since disappeared; Milestone Film
& Video has released not only the documentary but the supplement shorts and
feature to DVD, which is now available as of today, as a matter of fact. Milestone founder and Facebook chum Dennis
Doros was gracious enough to send me what we call in the blog business a
“screener,” and I was able to have a look at the entire package this
weekend. I’ve long been a fan of
Milestone; several of their releases occupy permanent positions in the dusty Thrilling Days of Yesteryear archives
(you may remember me talking up their Charley Chase collection, Cut
to the Chase, earlier this year) including a few of their acclaimed Mary
Pickford releases. They’ve also released
a number of independent films to DVD (examples include The Exiles and I
Am Cuba) not to mention responsibility for a number of documentaries shown
on the aforementioned Tee Cee Em (notably Captured
on Film: The True Story of Marion Davies).
The Elephant in the Room is a most worthy addition to their
first-rate silent film catalog.
Diana Sierra Cary marked her 95th birthday on October
29—both the IMDb and Wikipedia record it as the 26th, which is at odds with
what Cary has written…and I think she’s in a better position to know—and along
with Mickey Rooney, Jean Darling and Carla Laemmle is one of the last surviving
film stars to have worked in the silent era.
She began her motion picture career at the age of 19 months…and was
considered a “has-been” by the time she turned 11. After a second career as a movie extra and a third vocation devoted to the Catholic church as well as a greeting card business, Cary eventually found her niche as a film historian, telling the stories of Hollywood stuntmen (including her father, who used to double for cowboy star Tom Mix) in The Hollywood Posse and other kiddie performers in Hollywood's Children. The Elephant in the Room chronicles
much of her story, which takes turns both tragic and triumphant in its
hour-long presentation.
My distaste for child actors has never been a secret here on
the blog, though I do have an affection for some (I always liked the Our Gang
kids because they were just basically being kids onscreen)—and the first time I
watched the Baby Peggy presentation back in December 2012 I had a little
difficulty discerning what all the fuss was about. The shorts that were shown—Carmen, Jr. (1923), Such is Life (1924) and Peg o’the Mounted (1924)—basically feature
a cutesy kid mimicking grownup actions, and that sort of thing gets old with me
real fast. Such is Life avoids this some, but commits the cardinal cinematic
sin of replacing funny with sticky-sweet.
It also doesn’t help that the shorts (again, Life is the exception) are one-reelers…or what preservationist
David Kalat once correctly identified as “the ugly stepchildren of silent
comedy.”
But since I was afforded the opportunity to see one of
Cary’s feature films, Captain January,
I’m getting a better understanding of the Baby Peggy appeal. It’s probably her best-known movie, owing to
the fact that it was remade in 1936 as a musical vehicle with legendary moppet
actor Shirley Temple. I really enjoyed
watching the 1924 version; sure, it’s sloppy with sentiment and corny as Kansas
in August but there are two factors in its favor at work: 1) the artistry of
silent films (it was directed by one-time Buster Keaton crony Eddie Cline), and
2) it does not feature Shirley Temple. January is an adaptation of the Laura
E. Richards book of the same name (published in 1891), and features Peggy as an
orphan taken in by lighthouse keeper Jeremiah “Daddy” Judkins (Hobart
Bosworth). Complications ensue when the
sister (Irene Rich) of Peggy’s ma (who was lost at sea) has a chance meeting
with the child, and identifies her as her niece. (Quelle coinkydink!)
Diana Serra Cary’s life is briefly sketched out in The
Elephant in the Room, and there are some wonderfully poignant moments
in the documentary—with my favorite at the beginning, where she opens up her
mailbox (in a row of identical boxes, the kind often prevalent in apartment
complexes) to find a fistful of fan mail; she wistfully explains how a new
generation of classic movie devotees have discovered her work and want to know more
about her. Cary’s tale is a sad if
cautionary one; the woman made roughly two fortunes before she turned 11 (one stolen
by a family member, the other wiped out in the 1929 stock market crash) and had
nothing to show for all the work (and her memoir, Whatever
Happened to Baby Peggy?, goes into excruciating detail of how she often toiled
for eight hours a day as a child star, frequently working without a stunt
person). Movie fans know that a similar financial
fate befell Jackie Coogan (Cary even penned a biography on her rival, Jackie
Coogan: The World’s Boy King in 2004) and that steps were taken to ensure
that money earned by child actors was squirreled away for their future
(legislation that became known as the Coogan Act). There were ways to get around this (there’s
always a loophole, folks) and the law was eventually amended by the efforts of
Cary and former Donna Reed Show actor Paul Petersen through the organization A
Minor Consideration.
If you missed the TCM showing of Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the
Room I’d heartily recommend the purchase of the Milestone DVD—particularly
since Captain January and the other
three shorts are part of the package, and I’d personally buy the disc for January alone (don’t make the mistake I
did in not acquiring Milestone’s Marion Davies DVD release—which is now
out-of-print, and so I missed the opportunity to see her feature film Quality Street). Those of you who’ve been stopping by this
‘umble scrap of the blogosphere are well aware that silent cinema is a passion
of mine, and The Elephant in the Room is a mesmerizing and informative
chronicle of one of the most popular personalities of that era.
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