A totally muddled movie with a plot that fails to make any sense at all is Universal's Baby Peggy vehicle, "The Family Secret" (1924). The plot revolves around the fact that the hero is sent to jail for three and a half years for visiting his wife without his father-in-law's permission. As the wife was 29 years old at the time, I would not have thought such permission was necessary, but obviously New York (as painted in this film) is a city where Lewis Carroll wrote the statutes and everything is topsy-turvy. Or maybe the husband, as glibly portrayed by Edward Earle, is actually a cleverly disguised moron. He dresses neatly and seems to have a good job, doesn't foam at the mouth or do anything crazy except to allow himself to be sent to jail for visiting his wife. True, the sanity of the wife, as played by Gladys Hulette, is definitely suspect. She faints all the time, fails to come to her husband's defense, is easily deceived by her father and most certainly has a vacuous look about her in many a misty close-up. Sad to say, the child of a couple of morons is sometimes herself mentally retarded – and that's exactly how she is portrayed in this movie by Baby Peggy, although audiences in 1924 obviously found her moronic escapades amusing rather than pitiable. William A. Seiter directed with an obviously disinterested hand.