-By David Noh
For movie details, please click here.
Baby Peggy (aka Diana Serra Carey) was, quite simply, one of the
biggest child stars of the silent-movie era. An adorably pudgy
little imp with a Buster Brown haircut, she had the kind of
irresistible, feisty charm of her more universally remembered
successor, Shirley Temple. At the height of her career, she was
earning $1.5 million a year, her pixie face was insured for
$250,000, and she was the first child star to be mass-marketed,
with blazingly successful lines of clothing, dolls and the like.
Amazingly, it was all over by the time she was ten years old, and
after some sporadic work in vaudeville and as a movie extra, Peggy
fell into obscurity. Vera Iwerebor’s documentary
Baby Peggy: The
Elephant in the Room aims to find this forgotten star, who
started working at the age of three, and dissect what the hell
happened to her. It’s an engaging film which owes all of its charm
to its subject. Today, in her 90s, Carey is a dignified, perfectly
turned-out matron dedicated to investigating her obscure early
life. The “elephant” in her film’s title refers to the persona of
Baby Peggy herself, which, after she’d grown up, was never
discussed by her or her family.
The reasons for this are myriad—Iwerebor handles them with
admirable tact and a lack of easy sentiment—and stem largely from
the fact that Carey’s immense fortune, garnered by her nonstop work
under often shockingly unmonitored childhood conditions in the
freewheeling silent era, was largely squandered by shifty
management, as well as by her own father.
Carey did manage to find personal happiness and a family, despite
her dysfunctional upbringing, which often reads like some slightly
gentler version of
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,
including a sister who was largely neglected in the shadow of Baby
Peggy’s stardom. We see her today, her stardom fully restored to
her, as she makes fan-filled personal appearances at movie
nostalgia events, many of them dedicated to locating and preserving
her films. Shockingly, only a dozen of the 56 shorts she made
survive, many of them discovered in European vaults. Through it
all, Carey, who found her true creative love in writing a couple of
solid books of movie history, maintains a wry, down-to-earth
attitude about her blighted career. The extant complexity of all
this reveals itself when she confesses to catching herself
sometimes feeling anger towards her little grandson for simply
being a child and happily playing when, in her eyes, he should be
working like she had to, practically from the cradle.
Film Review: Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room
Sweet and engaging documentary about perhaps the last surviving silent-era actor.
Sept 5, 2012
-By David Noh
For movie details, please click here.
Baby Peggy (aka Diana Serra Carey) was, quite simply, one of the biggest child stars of the silent-movie era. An adorably pudgy little imp with a Buster Brown haircut, she had the kind of irresistible, feisty charm of her more universally remembered successor, Shirley Temple. At the height of her career, she was earning $1.5 million a year, her pixie face was insured for $250,000, and she was the first child star to be mass-marketed, with blazingly successful lines of clothing, dolls and the like.
Amazingly, it was all over by the time she was ten years old, and after some sporadic work in vaudeville and as a movie extra, Peggy fell into obscurity. Vera Iwerebor’s documentary
Baby Peggy: The Elephant in the Room aims to find this forgotten star, who started working at the age of three, and dissect what the hell happened to her. It’s an engaging film which owes all of its charm to its subject. Today, in her 90s, Carey is a dignified, perfectly turned-out matron dedicated to investigating her obscure early life. The “elephant” in her film’s title refers to the persona of Baby Peggy herself, which, after she’d grown up, was never discussed by her or her family.
The reasons for this are myriad—Iwerebor handles them with admirable tact and a lack of easy sentiment—and stem largely from the fact that Carey’s immense fortune, garnered by her nonstop work under often shockingly unmonitored childhood conditions in the freewheeling silent era, was largely squandered by shifty management, as well as by her own father.
Carey did manage to find personal happiness and a family, despite her dysfunctional upbringing, which often reads like some slightly gentler version of
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, including a sister who was largely neglected in the shadow of Baby Peggy’s stardom. We see her today, her stardom fully restored to her, as she makes fan-filled personal appearances at movie nostalgia events, many of them dedicated to locating and preserving her films. Shockingly, only a dozen of the 56 shorts she made survive, many of them discovered in European vaults. Through it all, Carey, who found her true creative love in writing a couple of solid books of movie history, maintains a wry, down-to-earth attitude about her blighted career. The extant complexity of all this reveals itself when she confesses to catching herself sometimes feeling anger towards her little grandson for simply being a child and happily playing when, in her eyes, he should be working like she had to, practically from the cradle.
