User Reviews

I was not aware that Baby Peggy made this film--I am only aware of the later remake starring Shirley Temple. Now that I've seen the Baby Peggy version, I'll get the Temple version and compare them sometime in the next few days.

The story begins with Peggy living with an old lighthouse keeper she calls 'Daddy Judkins'. It seems that five years earlier, the old man found a dead mother and her baby clinging to life---and he raised the girl as his own. They are very happy together and she's been nicknamed 'Captain January' and helps him run the place and catch lobsters. However, a few busybodies in the nearby community want to take her away from him--supposedly for her own good. Before they can try to do this, however, the child's aunt and uncle discover her and want to take her back to their mansion to live. Legally, Daddy Judkins cannot keep the child but Captain January can't live without him. What are they to do?

The film clearly was meant to pull on the heartstrings of the audience and I am pretty sure theaters were filled with bawling patrons. However, the sentimentality is very well done. Part of this is Hobart Bosworth (as Daddy Judkins) was a very experienced and able actor. While Peggy was no Shirley Temple (her acting range isn't quite as great), she also was very good--and more importantly, she was freaking adorable. Overall, it's a very slickly produced and sentimental old film--the sort that has managed to retain much of its charm today. For lovers of old silents, this is a must-see.

UPDATE: I just watched the Shirley Temple version tonight. The plot was a bit different and, not surprisingly it had some singing and dancing. Overall, I was surprised that I actually preferred the Baby Peggy version--mostly because it less often got schmaltzy and the singing actually didn't help the story. Just my opinion.

I was thrilled to find this movie, along with two other of Baby Peggy's films: "Family Secret" and "Helen's Babies", available from silent film video dealers. Baby Peggy is one of the most adorable child actresses of all times. She is on a heavenly cloud inhabited only by Margaret O'Brien and Virginia Lee Corbin. For utter adorability, only Margaret O'Brien in "Meet Me in St. Louis" is comparable. The stills of Baby Peggy that one finds on auction sites do no justice to this little girl's ability to make one laugh and cry at the same moment. Her smile is stellar. Her pain palatable. When she cuddles with Judkins, you can almost feel her in your lap! It a strange experience, a very rare ability for any actress. No wonder Baby Peggy was a box office sensation and the world's first five-year-old self-made millionaire.

Hobart Bosworth's performance as Jerimiah Judkins, the lighthouse keeper who finds Baby Peggy washed up on shore during a storm, is also infectious, indescribable and delicious. I'm with him on this one! Anyone takes Baby Peggy away from Judkins will have to deal with me and the rest of you viewers as well. Down with busybodies and despicable social workers!

Captain January is from a script written for Baby Peggy. Later, when her fortune had been robbed by her father's business manager, and the studios no longer wanted her and the Montegomery's were broke, her father sold her half-ownership of the script for $500 to Shirley Temple's studio. In my opinion this was an ignominious rip-off, and Shirley's remake wasn't nearly as good.

I love this movie.

Captain January (1924)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Lighthouse keeper Jeremiah Judkins (Hobart Bosworth) has one friend in this world and it's a young girl known as Captain January (Baby Peggy). He found her as a baby when she washed up from a ship wreckage but five years later he's afraid he's going to lose her when her aunt and uncle come looking for her. CAPTAIN January was quite a story when it was released as the young Baby Peggy had just been signed to an unheard of $1.5 million deal. Baby Peggy's main rival in this era was Jackie Coogan and it's easy to see why since this here is basically just a reworked version of Charles Chaplin's THE KID. In both films, a young child is left with someone who really loves them but the drama kicks in when an outsider comes to break that love apart. This film here goes overboard in the cute department as there are way too many scenes that are meant to show you that Baby Peggy is cute. We get it, she is cute. The film runs less than a hour but very little actually happens because so much of the running time has "cute" title cards telling us how cute the child is. Still, fans of silent films will still want to check this out for a couple reasons. The biggest are the performances as both Baby Peggy and Bosworth are extremely good in their parts. Another reason to check it out is just for the curious wanting to see THE KID reworked. CAPTAIN January isn't a masterpiece but it's certainly not a horrid film either and with so few Baby Peggy movies surviving, this here is certainly worth watching.

Baby Peggy may have wowed them back in 1924, and she certainly can be applauded for what child stars had to endure when taking into consideration the effect an early show biz career had on her life.

But let's face it--the Shirley Temple version years later told the story more skillfully and had the advantage of starring the world's number one box office star with the out-sized talent for a tot of her years. Temple dispensed so much charm and talent that she became a national institution.

Baby Peggy looks more like another famous child star--Jane Withers, but in a sweeter package. Withers was famous for her mischievous tomboy roles but Baby Peggy is simply more like a real life little girl who enjoys being around grown-ups.

The film has been well preserved with a pristine print, telling the well-known story of a lighthouse keeper and his tender care of a child who was lost at sea in a shipwreck. The simple story line builds on their close relationship and the fact that she might be taken away from him.

All of this was handled with more charm and humor in the later version starring Shirley Temple with Guy Kibbe as the lighthouse keeper.

Only six Baby Peggy's feature films have survived today, one being made earlier in the year, the highly-critically praised July 1924 "Captain January." She carries more the dramatic weight since her character is found washed up shore where an old lighthouse keeper discovers her. The two establish a close bond, only to have her parents tracing her to the lighthouse. The strength of Peggy's acting was her pantomiming physicality, displaying an uncanny ability to show an entire range of emotions for a child of her age. "Captain January's" script called for a special showcase of happiness when she's interacting with the keeper, while turning 180 degrees when she finds out she has to leave him. As one film historian notes, "silent films were quite advantageous to child performers. Instead of memorizing lines, they were free to create performances out of pure movement and emotion and they did this quite well. Child acting has never quite recovered from the coming of sound."

Baby Peggy was as famous in the 1920s as Shirley Temple was in the 1930s. In fact, Shirley Temple remade "Captain January" in 1936. But as quickly as Peggy rose to prominence in the early 1920s, she just as speedily fell in 1925 when her father, Jack Montgomery, got in a fierce argument with Universal's producer Sol Lesser about her salary. After that confrontation, the studio executive abruptly released Peggy from her contract. She was secretly blacklisted from the other Hollywood studios who didn't want to deal with her father's abrasive behavior. Peggy turned to the vaudeville stage, where she drew large crowds. But the family became tired of the arduous traveling circuit and, much to Peggy's delight, she stopped performing in the late 1920s.

With all the money she made in movies and on the stage, Peggy should have enjoyed the fruits of her labors. However, her parents, Baby Peggy's financial handers, were proliferate and careless spenders, draining her hard-earned millions. The 1929 stock market crash placed the family in financial straits where the parents resorted to food coupons from the Motion Picture Relief Fund. Baby Peggy received a high school degree and ran away from home in 1935. Her marriage to bartender Gordon Ayres in 1938 was equally awash in poverty as newspaper columnist Walter Winchell discovered in 1940, finding the pair in a small New York City studio with only doughnuts to eat.

Wanting to get a complete break from Baby Peggy, she adopted the first name Diana and took her artist second husband's last name, Cary, when they married in 1954. She eventually accepted being the former childhood actress, writing several books on her personal experiences and the movie industry. In addition, she became a film historian, giving lectures around the country about the era of silent movies and the personalities during that remarkable time. In February 24, 2020, at the age of 101, she passed away, marking Baby Peggy as the last star of the silent movie generation and closing a unique chapter in cinema.

Child-star Baby Peggy is adorable and funny, per usual it seems, but "Captain January" is another one of those old-fashioned, mawkish melodramas that I find distasteful. In this one, Peggy plays the titular character adopted by an old lighthouse keeper five years ago after a shipwreck on a stormy night washes her ashore. Most of the drama is concerned with the lighthouse keeper, Daddy Judkins, in a continual panic over others trying to take her away from him. Indeed, it is similar to Charlie Chaplin's "The Kid," co-starring fellow child-star Jackie Coogan, except that this one extends the tear-jerker father-child separation crisis to lesser effect. If this is your cup of tea, however, there is some picturesque seashore photography, its runtime is appreciably brief, and Baby Peggy is charming. There are a few comedic moments, too, including a cursing parrot.

On the other hand, co-stars Hobart Bosworth as the sentimental and sickly Judkins and a wasted Irene Rich surely did better work elsewhere (although Bosworth seems to have specialized in fatherly roles by this time, Rich is far more appealing in "Lady Windermere's Fan" (1925)). As available today, the cutting is rather choppy, but that's to be expected and forgivable. The habit of telling instead of showing is not, though, including never developing the history of hatred between Judkins and the villainous Maxwell, and the abrupt ending seems tacked-on. Yet, it's no wonder that this was later remade as a vehicle for another kid actor, Shirley Temple.