The child star here, Baby Peggy, who as of this posting is 100 years old and counting and going by the name of Diana Serra Cary in her adult career as a writer, has an interesting life story that's been chronicled in the documentary "Baby Peggy, the Elephant in the Room" (2012), as well as in her autobiography, "What Ever Happened to Baby Peggy?" As for this feature-length film starring her, it's a dated and flimsy melodrama mixed with some slightly amusing scenes of Peggy, who unfortunately doesn't appear until a third of the way through the roughly one-hour-long restored print. Without her, the picture suffers from the preposterous stupidity of the adult characters. Of some note, however, is the repetition of the narrative.
Narratives that mirror themselves aren't uncommon, but they usually aren't as simple and short as this one. The family's patriarch Simon Selfridge refuses to allow the marriage of his daughter, Margaret, to Garry, for... reasons, I guess. Garry and Margaret allow this rich old buzzard to dictate terms to them instead of living on their own with their baby because... well, that's a good question, actually--I don't know why, and it doesn't seem that the filmmakers did either. Anyways, after being kicked out, Garry sneaks into the Selfridge house at night, whereupon Simon has him arrested, Gary assaults a policeman and Margaret faints (again). Skip three-and-a-half years, when Garry is released from his prison sentence, and the film begins to pick up thanks to the charms of Baby Peggy, who eventually melts the heart of grandfather Simon, too.
Besides Margaret fainting twice, the narrative repeats itself with two baths (Peggy and then her dog), two scenes of Peggy making a mess in the house (first with a toy train and food and, later, with the fleas of her new dog--hence the baths). There's also the necklace with the wedding ring, which is shown early on and figures prominently in a later flashback, and Garry even manages to unlawfully enter a Selfridge house through a window for a second time. Thus, the first third of the film has Simon making a mess of things, while the third act offers the prospect of redemption through repetition.
The story, however, is mostly ridiculous. Margaret is such a vacuous idiot that she's misled to believe that her husband has disappeared rather than been sentenced to prison, and she allows her nurse, which she has, presumably, due to her fainting spells or severe stupidity, to prevent her from seeing her daughter. One would need to be able to read a newspaper and have an ounce of will power to do otherwise. There's also some bland, if not necessarily very offensive, humor involving black servants and immigrants and the intertitles mimicking their supposed dialects ("I done got her a present," for example, being the first words attributed to "Uncle Mose"). The plot of Baby Peggy running away from home and briefly living among the working class, including trading her dress for a more modest one and a banana, doesn't take any opportunity for social commentary and, instead, merely seems to serve advancing the plot. At least, it's short and briskly paced--even choppy, the ludicrous melodrama is partially alleviated by the cutesy kiddie stuff, and the plot reflects itself succinctly.
