Secrets (1933)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

You won't be disappointed!

Please don't spend money on this.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Although it wasn't planned that way at the time, Secrets (1933) turned out to be Mary Pickford's last film. An odd choice for her, since the male role is the main one. Although not a total write-off, the film's more than a bit disappointing. Most movies adapted from stage plays do their best to disguise that fact. This one doesn't! The action falls into three very distinct Acts. The first is played mainly for comedy with Leslie Howard (of all people) enacting a clownish young man on an idiotic penny farthing bicycle - and playing it most unconvincingly. I suspect that Marshal Neilan directed most of this rubbish before producer Pickford woke up to his incompetence and fired him. His replacement, Frank Borzage handled the night garden scene with pictorial finesse, but didn't do much with the rest of the movie, although the Second Act turned out as actually the most interesting of the three. It's a western, would you believe, with Leslie Howard as a gunslinger? He's more convincing than you might expect, but we have to wait for Act Three before we encounter really charismatic acting - and it doesn't come from either the stars or the main support players, but from Mona Maris who plays her one scene with presence and style. The aim of the stage play was obviously to show the main male character through three stages of his life - young, unsure romantic, then reluctant hero, and finally discredited heel. This sort of stagey device can work well in a theater where the Acts are conspicuously separated by long Intervals while the stage-hands change the set. In a movie, where the Acts are divided by no more than an insert title, the device seems both jarring and artificial - here especially as neither Howard nor Pickford can muster enough gusto to bring it off. No wonder Pickford never returned to the screen! You might have the main role, but even an incompetent male lead - or a really jazzy also-in-the-cast whom the director, the photographer and the dress designer wish to indulge - can muscle you right off the screen and put you in the shadows!

Pickford's screen swan song is her best talkie, admittedly not a high bar, that moves at breakneck speed through its tale of the romance, marriage, struggles and ultimate success of its main couple. It crams too much into its 83 minute running time but as early sound films go it's not bad.At 42 she's unconvincing as a young belle at the beginning of the film but after about ten minutes she's out of that guise and from then on her performance is quite good. Unsurprisingly her strongest moments, as well as the film's, are the one's without dialog. It gives a peek at why she was one of the queens of silents and it seems regretful that just as she was adjusting to sound she chose to withdraw. The film wasn't a hit on release and Mary, nothing if not canny, sensed that though the parade had not passed her by as of yet it was just around the corner. So she retired, enormously wealthy and a power broker behind the scenes.

I love Mary Pickford films and would list many of them among my very favorite silents. She was magnificent in gems such as DADDY LONG LEGS, SUDS, SPARROWS and MY BEST GIRL and is perhaps my favorite silent actress. However, I am NOT a "Kool-Aid drinker"--you know, a person that loves a star so much that I can't objectively review their films. This is the type person that gives every single one of the movies scores like 9 or 10! And, when I looked at the overall score for this (7.4) and some amazingly positive reviews, I knew I was in the land of Kool-Aid!The bottom line is that the talkies were not kind to Miss Pickford. Even though she received an Oscar for COQUETTE, she clearly didn't earn it for that performance. The Oscar was more an acknowledgment of her past film achievements. However, by 1933, it was obvious that America's Sweetheart was no longer a guaranteed box office draw and SECRETS fell flat in theaters. However, its failure wasn't due to Pickford this time as much as it was due to a terribly dull and episodic plot. Her acting here was actually better than COQUETTE, as at least she was believable and didn't put on a crazy accent--though she was rather old to play such a young girl. At 41, she played a woman who was probably about 16 at the beginning of the film--though she did a great job of making it all seem possible and this really didn't hurt the film.The movie seems very much like an Edna Ferber novel (such as CIMARRON)--a sweeping saga that is so grand and so bigger than life that the characters seem more like caricatures than real people. In particular, Leslie Howard comes off as rather wooden and tough to understand--especially since his personality in the film changes so wildly and unpredictably. In spite of this, Pickford stood by her man like Tammy Wynette and this hurts her character as well--making her seem like a sad door mat late in the film.The plot involves rich Easterners Pickford and Howard eloping and going West in the mid-nineteenth century. Pickford came from a rich family and gave up everything for her love. Once they arrive, life is hard but the film is engaging...for a while. The segment where they fight against cattle thieves and they lose their baby is reasonably well done and engaging--and none of the rest of the film is anything like it!! After this decent segment, the final half of the film is more like watching a highlights reel--with only very short snippets shown of various decades until the pair become old and decrepit. Amazingly, although this is dull and unsatisfying, the writers manage to make it worse by sticking in some pointless sexual peccadilloes that manage to make you wonder why you even care about the characters any more. The film would have been MUCH better had it stuck to a much briefer time span or if they'd filmed it as a series of two or three films. Shoving all this into 131 minutes was just impossible.The bottom line is that this film is a huge disappointment to fans and will do nothing to make those not in love with Pickford care a bit about her. Despite decent acting on her part, her character seems a bit desperate and stupid and her husband, Leslie Howard does an unconvincing job playing a human weasel! Don't bother with the film unless you are a die-hard fan or if you want to see Ned Sparks in one of his better supporting roles.

Mary Pickford's farewell to the screen was this film Secrets which seems like a cut rate version of Cimarron with a little bit of pre-Code infidelity thrown in. Whole chunks of the film I viewed tonight seem to have been edited out unfortunately and the viewer has to piece together what is missing.I will say that Pickford did give a good performance in her farewell film, she ages quite nicely from the young ingénue she normally plays all the way up to being a little old lady, a queen of Washington society besides.Her leading man in Secrets is Leslie Howard, an earnest young fellow in the employ of her father C. Aubrey Smith who's arranging a marriage with a stuffy English title in a suit. Mary's got eyes only for Howard though and they elope with proper ladder and all right out from under the noses of Smith, mother Blanche Fredirici, and the empty suit title Herbert Evans.Smith has the power to make sure Howard's name is mud in New England so Howard and Pickford go west by wagon train the way Yancey and Sabra Cravat do in Cimarron. Leslie Howard's as much not home on the range as he was in The Petrified Forest. But he does have grit and so does she. There's also a question of infidelity which would not have gotten by the Code in a couple of years. It reflects the real life marital problems that Pickford was having right about then with her storybook marriage to Douglas Fairbanks ending. On screen Howard is having a fling with Mona Maris and he mentions there've been others. Still Mary stands by her man, unlike in real life.One should see Secrets for no other reason than seeing Ned Sparks in the role of sidekick to Howard. He's less home on the range than Leslie. Who'd have thought both their screen credits would include a western or semi-western as the case may be.The way the musical score was played during the film it was very reminiscent of silent films. Probably something Mary Pickford arranged as she was the producer as well.Secrets is not a great film, though the stars perform more than adequately. It was too old fashioned for public taste when it was released in 1933, let alone now.