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.
