The Heart Breaker

Jerry Madden (known as Jerry the Giant) is yet another in the seemingly endless roll-call of US child-stars from this period and the ifilm is also known as Jerry the Heartbraker (sic). He cannot I think have been bornquite as late as 1923 as suggested by IMDB because he is older than two in this film, which follows an increasingly popular pattern of mildly sexualised portrayals of children. There a dog too (yet another Pal), and an elephant.....

Basically little Jerry elopes with a young girl whose parents have just divorced. The mother thinks the father (denied custody) has kidnapped her and, as it happens, the three (Jerry, girl and dog) do end up (along with the elephant and various zoo animals) stowing away on the same boat as the father (bound for Europe) and the other (in pursuit of father). The award for best actor goes to the baby elephant who should have been given a bigger part.

I am trying to work back to the origins of the abominable passion for children and animals in films but it is a bit difficult to locate the ultimate guilty party and even if one could, how could one then go back in time to murder them in the hope of changing history? So, heart-breaking though it may indeed be, we just have to live with the horror of it all ....

In fairness it is not amusing. One has seen worse - much much worse.

Jerry Madden is a small boy in a busted straw hat and overalls. He and his dog Pal fall in with a small girl, and their wanderings lead them to a circus menagerie on board a liner bound for Europe.

Most of the gags involve the animals, including a couple of young lion cubs and elephants who get loose on the ship. It's an innocuous sort of comedy in which one major gag is having the toddlers flirt like adults. Young Madden went on to participate in a dozen shorts and movies over the following four years. Today he is forgotten, and rightly so.