Pickford had been interested in the story for years. Secrets had first been made into a silent film in 1924 with Norma Talmadge as Mary, directed by Frank Borzage, who was building a reputation as a great romantic director (he won the first ever Academy Award for directing one of the silent era's most touching love stories, 1927's Seventh Heaven). Pickford's follow-up to Coquette, The Taming of the Shrew (1929), co-starring her husband Douglas Fairbanks, had not been a success, and making it had further strained the couple's deteriorating marriage. Her confidence shaken, Pickford wanted to make an epic on her own, and in 1930 she decided to re-make Secrets as a talkie. Her close friends and frequent collaborators, writer Frances Marion and director Marshall Neilan, would work with her. Unfortunately, Neilan's drinking had gotten out of control, and after filming for a month and spending $300,000 on the project, Pickford cancelled the production and ordered all the negatives burned.
Instead, she made Kiki (1931), but she was badly miscast as a Parisian chorus girl. It too flopped. Pickford then decided to revive her plan to make Secrets, and approached Marion to take another crack at it. Marion was reluctant. She thought there was "too much story," and was unhappy with the play's flashback structure. Still, Pickford was insistent, and Marion, who had heard rumors about Fairbanks' infidelities, suspected that the story about a woman standing by her unfaithful husband resonated with Pickford. Perhaps it was Pickford's way of sending a message to Fairbanks. So Marion swallowed her misgivings and agreed to work on the script, re-structuring it and telling the story chronologically instead of with flashbacks. Pickford hired Borzage, who had made the silent version, to direct.
In her autobiography, Sunshine and Shadow (1955), Pickford blamed the failure of Secrets on bad timing, saying she made "what I consider a creditable picture. Unfortunately, Secrets opened in twenty-five key cities on the day President Roosevelt declared a bank holiday. Very few people were spending money on entertainment in the weeks that followed, and while the film was well received, it was a financial disaster." Time magazine's grudgingly respectful yet dismissive review hints at another reason for the film's failure: "Mary Pickford is now 40....She has never quite grown accustomed to talkies or to any type of acting for which a close-up view of her smiling profile is not an adequate substitute, but her failure has never embarrassed her. In Secrets she exhibits the same curious knowledge of how to keep the sympathy of an audience that made her a star in two-reel pictures before an audience knew her name."
Pickford never intended for Secrets to be her final film. A fan of Mickey Mouse, she worked with Walt Disney on plans for a film version of Alice in Wonderland, which would combine animation with live-action and star Pickford as Alice. A screen test and stills of Pickford as Alice exist, but the film never happened. Her marriage to Fairbanks ended in 1935, and Pickford, who had been a secret drinker for years, began drinking in earnest. She remarried (her second husband was Charles "Buddy" Rogers), and over the years talked about returning to the screen, but she never did. She died in 1979, at the age of 87.
Director: Frank Borzage
Screenplay: Salisbury Field, Frances Marion, Leonard Praskins; Rudolph Besier, May Edginton (both the play)
Cinematography: Ray June
Art Direction: Richard Day
Music: Alfred Newman
Film Editing: Hugh Bennett
Cast: Mary Pickford (Mary Marlowe Carlton), Leslie Howard (John Carlton), C. Aubrey Smith (Mr. William Marlowe), Blanche Frederici (Mrs. Martha Marlowe), Doris Lloyd (Susan Channing), Herbert Evans (Lord Hurley), Ned Sparks (Sunshine), Allan Sears (Jake Houser), Mona Maris (Senora Lolita Martinez).
BW-99m.
by Margarita Landazuri
