Peg o' the Mounted

Another "lost" film back from the dead! I viewed "Peg o' the Mounted" -- lost for years, but now found again -- at the 2006 Cinema Muto festival in Sacile, Italy. Even more impressively, at the same screening I got to meet this film's star! Diana Serra Cary, who once performed as 'Baby Peggy', is still alive and well with a delightfully capacious memory of her silent-film days. She was kind enough to answer my questions and pose for a photograph with me.

The Baby Peggy comedies, though extremely crude and made on a cheapjack budget, were immensely popular. (Ms Cary told me they were ground out in five days apiece.) "Peg o' the Mounted" has a title which seems to parody "Peg o' My Heart", though its plot line seems to anticipate "Susanna of the Mounties". This short stands out from the rest of the series by virtue of being filmed in Yosemite Valley, and there are some stirring location shots here.

For some reason, Baby Peggy is living in the Yukon, where she has some sort of domestic relationship with a big strapping Mountie. Normally, the Mountie always gets his man, but this time he's been nobbled by a moonshiner. It doesn't help when Baby Peggy doses the Mountie with castor oil and Sloan's Liniment. Then she puts on her own Mountie uniform and vows to capture the moonshiner herself.

The villain of this piece is played by Jack Earle, a pituitary giant who stood just under eight feet tall. When he stands beside Baby Peggy, we see that he is more than twice her height! Earle, who was Jewish, had extremely Semitic features ... which is unfortunate in this context; cast in a villain role, Earle looks more than a little like one of those Shylockish Jewish villains. Most giants are physically weak, so it's astonishing to see how easily Earle hefts his massive frame across the screen. At one point, Earle picks up Baby Peggy and tosses her what looks like half a mile away! The trick photography -- a jump cut, and the substitution of a doll for the live girl -- is intentionally so obvious that we laugh rather than cringing in sympathy.

The Baby Peggy films tend to have a gentle humour, dealing more in twee reversals and cuteness rather than belly-laughs. I'll rate this just 5 out of 10.

Postscript: Jack Earle left movies to perform in the Sells and Flotos Circus. He had the odd luck to sustain a minor head injury in a car accident; the injury suppressed his pituitary gland and stopped his growth! He lived to be 46, an astonishingly long lifespan for a giant.

Turner Classic Movies recently showed a documentary about an early child star, Baby Peggy, who was a huge hit during the silent era. In addition to showing this, they also showed one of her full-length films as well as some shorts--one of which was "Peg o' the Mounted". Of all the shorts they showed, this one was my favorite--even though it is 100% silly! So silly, in fact, to really enjoy it you need to turn off your brain and just watch! Baby Peggy sure looks young in this one.

Although she would have been 5, I wonder if perhaps this short sat on the shelf a bit, as she appeared to be 3 or perhaps 4 at the oldest. She lives in the Canadian wilderness (actually, it was filmed at Yosimite). When she comes upon an injured Mountie who was pursuing moonshiners, Peggy dons a uniform herself and takes on the entire moonshine gang! While completely ridiculous, it works simply because the child is so freaking adorable in the uniform and the film NEVER takes itself seriously--which is a big plus. A lot of silly fun.

Baby Peggy, along with Jackie Coogan, was one of the biggest child stars of the early 1920s. In the 2012 documentary "Baby Peggy, the Elephant in the Room," it was reported that 12 of her short films survive, and there may be more now. This one, "Peg o' the Mounted," seems to be incomplete if, as reported, it was originally two reels, but the Netherlands print, retitled "Hands Up!," runs only about 12 minutes. One gag, in particular, involving Peggy's disappearing outerwear is unexplained in the surviving footage.

In it, Peggy nurses an injured Mountie and vows to capture the moonshiners whom he'd been injured in the pursuit of. So, she dresses up as a Mountie, as though playing the Canadian version of such childhood pastimes as Cowboys and Indians or Cops and Robbers, but with "real" gunplay and moonshiners. Much of the humor is based in characters just running around in fast motion. It's silly, but, at least, it's short and not hampered by the maudlin narratives of the two feature-length films that I've seen thus far starring Baby Peggy, "Captain January" and "The Family Secret" (both 1924), and it's interesting to see some of the work of one of the more obscure silent era Hollywood stars, who, as of this posting, has recently celebrated her 100th birthday and is claimed to be the last surviving star of the period.

Peg o' the Mounted (1924)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Baby Peggy short has her running into a wounded Mountie and deciding to help him out on the case he's been working on. She takes off into the Canadian wilderness and goes after some moonshiners (led by the 7 foot 7 inch Jack Earle). PEG O' THE MOUNTED is yet another film that doesn't have too many brains behind it and instead of good writing or a clever story we're basically just given Baby Peggy and she's forced to carry everything. I will admit that she contains a certain amount of charm but at the same time I couldn't help but wonder what she could have done with a better story. The three shorts shown on Turner Classic Movies all seem to suffer from poor writing. With that said, at just 13-minutes this film remains entertaining due to Baby Peggy as she has no trouble being charming. There are some good moments between the small Peggy and the big Earle and especially a sequence where she's attached to the back of his legs.