Baby Be Good

The first thing I noticed was that Bonnie Barrett looked like Shirley Temple: same curly, light brunette mop of hair and same sort of outfit. I suppose it was a type in the era, but looking back from almost ninety years later, it looks like Charles Lamont was looking for Shirley at this stage, even though she wouldn't turn up for more than half a decade.

For the rest of it, this is producer Jack White's attempt to do an Our Gang series. Everyone wanted to do one, since the Roach series was so successful. However, with this early effort, it's clear that they're trying to do too much. They're doing the poor little rich girl plot, and the inventions with misspelled signs and the pets and the run ins with the adults and each kid has to have some screen time.

It's too much. Our Gang never had that much to do. Some of the kids would lurk in the background for months at a time, and then you might spend three minutes watching a kid not take a Saturday morning bath. No one seemed to get that except for the people at Roach.

One of the performers who gets a lot of screen time is Malcolm "Big Boy" Sebastian. Not quite two, in his second movie, dressed in a big black hat, a t-shirt, diapers and boots, it's clear that this movie is about him. He would soon get his own series and through the end of the silent era, in 1929, would be a star. Then he would have one appearance with Our Gang in SHIVERING SHAKESPEARES and be out of the movies, superannuated at the age of seven.