Secrets (1933)

Film: Secrets (1933)

Stars: Mary Pickford, Leslie Howard

Director: Frank Borzage

Oscar Nominations: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2024 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the women who were once crowned as "America's Sweethearts" and the careers that inspired that title (and what happened when they eventually lost it to a new generation).  This month, our focus is on Shirley Temple: click here to learn more about Ms. Pickford (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

(Editor's Note: I'm aware it's not Saturday, but we're not going to short-change Miss Pickford because I didn't time my Saturday particularly well this week and over-booked myself...next month's star I've already written half of her articles already, so we'll be back on schedule)

As we talked about with our last article, Mary Pickford had experienced the first high-profile flop of her career with The Taming of the Shrew in 1929, her second sound film and a bad time to be having flops as the studios were nervous about any Silent Era star that couldn't translate.  This was the beginning of the end of Pickford's film career.  No longer able to play teenagers or child roles (by 1929, Pickford was already 27), the kind that made her a star, studios didn't know what to do with her, and increasingly actresses like Greta Garbo, Norma Shearer, & Joan Crawford began to succeed her as the most important women in Hollywood.  Her final film & our movie today, Secrets, was released in 1933.

(Spoilers Ahead) Secrets is about a couple, and it takes place in four acts.  The couple are Mary (Pickford) and John (Howard), and initially the power dynamic between them is inverted to what it would eventually become.  She's the daughter of a prominent businessman, he is a lowly clerk in her father's office.  But they begin to romance, and after John is fired from said job, they decide to run away into the American West together rather than her marrying another man.  There, they encounter hardship initially, but after a while great success, with John fulfilling his promise and becoming a governor, and then a senator, and Mary raising four of their five children to adulthood.

The movie is weirder than it sounds, and not because it's intended to be weird.  The four-act structure feels very regimented (you can tell this was based on a play), much to the film's chagrin as it makes it feel like four little movies rather than one big one.  After all, between Act 2 & 3, we go from these two being inseparable pioneers to John repeatedly cheating on Mary with a woman named Lolita (they were not subtle with the character monikers in this movie), and because this is Pre-Code, this is said straight out.  While John obviously stays with Mary, this weirdly doesn't cast a pall on the rest of the film, and I'll be honest, Pickford isn't a strong enough actress in sound to pull this tricky balance off.  It feels like she goes from being hurt to "oh well, my husband cheats on me, but at least he loves me" a little too quickly.  Pickford's inability to adapt to sound in terms of her acting style probably mattered more than her age & her speaking voice...I get why she retired after this, because there wasn't really room for this style of acting in the 1930's.

Pickford, as I mentioned above, would never headline another movie, though she'd sneak into a couple of short films as a cameo in the years that followed.  She would also continue to produce films in the years that followed, including 1949's Love Happy, a Marx Brothers picture which featured a small cameo from a very young Marilyn Monroe, but I'll be honest, most of Pickford's post-America's Sweetheart life is pretty sad.  She became an alcoholic, and divorced Douglas Fairbanks in 1936.  Both of her younger siblings died of alcohol-related illnesses in the 1930's, and she became reclusive, only seeing a handful of friends & family (including longtime pal Lillian Gish).  She was considered for the lead role in Sunset Boulevard (director Billy Wilder even went to meet with her at Pickfair), but by that point, isolated with memories of her stardom and faded glory in an aging house...Mary Pickford had basically become Norma Desmond.

Next month, we will talk about the actress who would succeed Mary Pickford as America's Sweetheart, someone whose career would also go south after she got too old...but would end up with a second career & a much happier ending than America's first Sweetheart.  We'll start our conversation about her on Thursday.